A Comparison of Mutation Analysis Tools for Java

Abstract

Mutation analysis allows software developers to evaluate the quality of a test suite. The quality is measured as the ability of the test suite to detect faults injected into the program under tests. A fault is detected if at least one test case gives different results on the original program and the fault injected one. Mutation tools aim at automating and speeding both the generation of fault injected variants, called mutants, and the execution of the test suite on those mutants. In this paper, we aim at offering meaningful elements of comparison between mutation tools for Java for different usage profiles.