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Last updated on Thursday, November 16, 2023
@article{Vercammen2023stvr,
author = {Sten Vercammen and Serge Demeyer and Markus Borg and
Niklas Pettersson and G\"{o}rel Hedin},
journal = {Software Testing, Verification and Reliability},
month = oct,
title = {Mutation testing optimisations using the {Clang}
front-end},
year = {2023},
abstract = {Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique
for assessing the fault detection capacity of a test
suite. Unfortunately, a full mutation analysis is
often prohibitively expensive. The CppCheck project
for instance, demands a build time of 5.8 min and a
test execution time of 17 s on our desktop computer.
An unoptimised mutation analysis, for 55,000
generated mutants took 11.8 days in total, of which
4.3 days is spent on (re)compiling the project. In
this paper, we present a feasibility study,
investigating how a number of optimisation strategies
can be implemented based on the Clang front-end.
These optimisation strategies allow to eliminate the
compilation and execution overhead in order to
support efficient mutation testing for the C language
family. We provide a proof-of-concept tool that
achieves a speedup of between 2 and 30. We make a
detailed analysis of the speedup induced by the
optimisations, elaborate on the lessons learned and
point out avenues for further improvements.},
annote = {internationaljournal},
doi = {10.1002/stvr.1865},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stvr.1865},
}