Mutation Testing - Historical Overview

Historical Overview

Mutation testing was originally proposed by Richard Lipton as a student in 1971, and first developed and published by DeMillo, Lipton and Sayward. The first implementation of a mutation testing tool was by Timothy Budd as part of his PhD work (titled Mutation Analysis) in 1980 from Yale University.

Recently, with the availability of massive computing power, there has been a resurgence of mutation analysis within the computer science community, and work has been done to define methods of applying mutation testing to object oriented programming languages and non-procedural languages such as XML, SMV, and finite state machines.

In 2004 a company called Certess Inc. extended many of the principles into the hardware verification domain. Whereas mutation analysis only expects to detect a difference in the output produced, Certess extends this by verifying that a checker in the testbench will actually detect the difference. This extension means that all three stages of verification, namely: activation, propagation and detection are evaluated. They have called this functional qualification.

Fuzzing is a special area of mutation testing. In fuzzing, the messages or data exchanged inside communication interfaces (both inside and between software instances) are mutated, in order to catch failures or differences in processing the data. Codenomicon (2001) and Mu Dynamics (2005) evolved fuzzing concepts to a fully stateful mutation testing platform, complete with monitors for thoroughly exercising protocol implementations.