Mutation Test Applied To Object-Oriented Programming

Software test is an important technique of software engineering, which guarantees the quality of software product. Mutation test is a test strategy to measure the adequacy of test case set and can be used to generate adequate test case set as well. Traditional mutation test is applied to the source code of program.A mutation test system based on algebraic specification was introduced in this thesis, which has been implemented on Java platform. Algebraic specification is usually used to describe the requirements of object-oriented program, so the new system is also an attempt of using mutation test on object-oriented area. The main contents and results of this thesis are as follows:1) According to the features of algebraic specification, 12 kinds of mutation operator were concluded as the mutation kernel module of the system.2) According to the FTC algorithm, the test case generation module of the system was designed.3) Using term rewriting technique, the method of killing mutants in the system was introduced in detail. 4) Using reflection mechanism of Java, a method of testing Java source code was implemented, which use algebraic equations as test cases.5) The new system has been tested on five different algebraic specifications. The correctness and the effectiveness of this new system have been validated.Compared with the traditional mutation test system, the new system based on algebraic specification is more effective but a little less adequate.The problem of traditional mutation system is the low efficiency, which caused by too large size of mutant set. The new system is an effective way to solve it, and has applicational value.