Mutation testing techniques for mobile applications.

Abstract

As it is well known, exhaustive testing of software systems (i.e., testing the system with its possible inputs and environmental conditions) is, in practice, impossible, since it is unfeasible to reproduce all the running situations. So, the tester must make decisions about which parts of the system must be tested and the degree of depth of the test cases. When a test engineer is testing a software artifact, he/she needs to know which portions of the system are running their test cases. For this, coverage criteria are used because they allow to know the "amount of product" that is being tested (number of lines of code, methods, decisions, conditions, etc.). If the tester knows the coverage that a set of test cases reaches on the SUT (the System Under Test), he/she will be able to determine which portions of the system are not being covered by the test cases: • If the coverage is lower than a prefixed threshold, the tester must add more test cases to cover the SUT more in depth, to force the execution of the unexplored system areas.