On the utility of dominator mutants for mutation testing

Abstract

Mutation testing has been shown to support the generation of test sets that are highly effective at detecting faults. However, practitioner adoption of mutation testing has been minimal in part because of problems that arise from the huge numbers of redundant and equivalent mutants that are generated. The research described here examines the relationship between mutants and attempts to reduce the number of redundant and equivalent mutants in order to make mutation testing more practical for the software tester.