Last updated on Monday, October 06, 2025
@inproceedings{Parsai2019SOFSEM,
address = {Cham},
author = {Ali Parsai and Serge Demeyer},
booktitle = {Proceedings {SOFSEM 2019} (Theory and Practice of
Computer Science)},
editor = {Catania, Barbara and Kr{\'a}lovi{\v{c}}, Rastislav and
Nawrocki, Jerzy and Pighizzini, Giovanni},
note = {Acceptance ratio: 35 / 92 = 38\%},
pages = {419--434},
publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
title = {Do Null-Type Mutation Operators Help Prevent
Null-Type Faults?},
year = {2019},
abstract = {The null-type is a major source of faults in Java
programs, and its overuse has a severe impact on
software maintenance. Unfortunately traditional
mutation testing operators do not cover null-type
faults by default, hence cannot be used as a
preventive measure. We address this problem by
designing four new mutation operators which model
null-type faults explicitly. We show how these
mutation operators are capable of revealing the
missing tests, and we demonstrate that these mutation
operators are useful in practice. For the latter, we
analyze the test suites of 15 open-source projects to
describe the trade-offs related to the adoption of
these operators to strengthen the test suite.},
annote = {internationalconference},
doi = {10.1145/3340481.3342739},
isbn = {978-3-030-10801-4},
}