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Last updated on Friday, July 18, 2025
@inproceedings{Demeyer2025Mutation,
author = {Serge Demeyer and Reiner H\"{a}hnle},
booktitle = {Proceedings {Mutation} 2025 (Workshop on Mutation
Testing)},
pages = {326 -- 336},
title = {Equivalent Mutants: Deductive Verification to the
Rescue},
year = {2025},
abstract = {Already since the dawn of mutation testing,
equivalent mutants have been a subject of academic
research. Up until now, all the investigated program
analysis techniques (infeasible paths, trivial
compiler equivalence, program slicing, symbolic
execution) focused on shielding the test engineer
from the decision whether a mutant is equivalent or
not. This paper argues for a complementary viewpoint:
providing test engineers with powerful analysis tools
(namely deductive verification) which show why a
mutant is equivalent, or come up with a counter
example if not. We illustrate by means of a series of
increasingly challenging examples (drawn from the
MutantBench dataset) how such an approach provides
valuable insights to the test engineer, as such
paving the way for an actionable improvement of the
test suite under analysis.},
annote = {workshoppaper},
doi = {10.1109/ICSTW64639.2025.10962501},
}