Mutation Testing - Mutation Operators

Mutation Operators

A variety of mutation operators were explored by researchers. Here are some examples of mutation operators for imperative languages:

• Statement deletion.
• Replace each boolean subexpression with true and false.
• Replace each arithmetic operation with another one, e.g. + with *, - and /.
• Replace each boolean relation with another one, e.g. > with >=, == and <=.
• Replace each variable with another variable declared in the same scope (variable types should be the same).

These mutation operators are also called traditional mutation operators. Beside this, there are mutation operators for object-oriented languages, for concurrent constructions, complex objects like containers etc. They are called class-level mutation operators. For example the MuJava tool offers various class-level mutation operators such as: Access Modifier Change, Type Cast Operator Insertion, Type Cast Operator Deletion. Moreover, mutation operators have been developed to perform security vulnerability testing of programs