Author
Hiralal Agrawal, Richard A. DeMillo, Bob Hathaway, William Hsu, Wynne Hsu, E.W. Krauser, R.J. Martin, Aditya P. Mathur, Eugene Spafford
Abstract
Mutation analysis is a method for reliable testing of large software systems. It provides a method for assessing the adequacy of test data. Mothra [DeMi87] is a mutation analysis based software testing environment that currently supports the testing of Fortran 77 programs. Work is underway to enhance thsi tool along several dimension. One of these is the addition of multilingual capability. C is one of the languages that we plan to support.
This report describes the mutant operators designed for the proposed ANSI C programming language. Mutant operators are categorized using syntactic criteria. Such a classification is expected to be useful for an implementor of mutation based testing system.
Another classification, useful for the tester, is based on the nature of tests that can be conducted using mutation analysis. This classification exposes the gen erality and completeness of mutation based testing.
Each mutant operator s introduced with illustrative examples. The rationale supporting each operator is also provided. An appendix provides a cross-reference of all mutant operators for ease of referencing.
The design described here is a result of long deliberations amongst authors of this report in, which several aspects of the C language and program development in C were examined. We intend this report to srve as a manual for thew C mutant operators fir researchers in software testing.
