Last updated on Monday, October 06, 2025
@inproceedings{Vercammen2021BENEVOL,
author = {Sten Vercammen and Serge Demeyer and Lars Van Roy},
booktitle = {Proceedings {BENEVOL 2021} (20th edition of the
BElgian-NEtherlands software eVOLution symposium)},
month = dec,
publisher = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)},
title = {Focal Methods for C/C++ via LLVM: Steps Towards
Faster Mutation Testing},
volume = {Vol-3071},
year = {2021},
abstract = {Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique
for assessing the fault detection capacity of a test
suite. Unfortunately, it is seldom applied in
practice because it is computationally expensive. In
this paper we explore the use of fine-grained
traceability links at the method level (named focal
methods), to drastically reduce the execution time of
mutation testing, by only executing the tests
relevant to each mutant. In previous work for Java
programs we achieve drastic speedups, in the range of
530x and more. In this paper we lay the foundation
for identifying such focal methods under test in
C/C++ programs by relying on the LLVM compiler
infrastructure. A preliminary investigation on an 3,5
KLOC C++ project illustrates that we can correctly
identify the focal method under test for 47 out of 61
tests,},
annote = {workshoppaper},
url = {http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3071/},
}