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Software Tests Quality Evaluation Using Code Mutants

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Reliability Engineering and Computational Intelligence for Complex Systems

Abstract

Software plays a significant role in nearly every system these days. Therefore a large emphasis has to be placed on its quality to minimize failures caused by programmers. Nearly every software development is followed by testing. However, low-quality software tests can lead to a false vision of software quality. In this paper, an approach to evaluate software tests quality is presented. This approach is based on mutation testing. The main idea of this approach is to generate mutations of the original source code using specified criteria. This mutation is tested by tests created for the original software, and the number of detected mutants by tests is evaluated. This approach is demonstrated in a simple program written in C# programming language.

This work is supported by Grant System of University of Zilina No. KOR/3181/2022. This work develops results of the project “Development of methods of healthcare system risk and reliability evaluation under coronavirus outbreak” which has been supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under Grant no. PP COVID-20-0013.

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Correspondence to Peter Sedlacek .

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Sedlacek, P., Rusnak, P., Vrabkova, T. (2023). Software Tests Quality Evaluation Using Code Mutants. In: van Gulijk, C., Zaitseva, E., Kvassay, M. (eds) Reliability Engineering and Computational Intelligence for Complex Systems. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40997-4_3

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