Twenty-Five Years of Research in Structural and Mutation Testing

Abstract

Research in software testing has been carried out for approximately forty years, but its importance has escalated very quickly in the last ten or fifteen years. In particular, structural and mutation testing are techniques which havereceived a large amount of investment in both academia and software development industry. In this paper, we draw a historical perspective on how they appeared and how they evolved. In particular, the main contributions on structural and mutation testing from two Brazilian researching groups -- ICMC-USP and FEEC-UNICAMP -- are described. We highlight the workproduced and published in these twenty-five years in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering and elsewhere, as well its impact in the community of software testing.