Coevolution of Second-order-mutant

Abstract

One of the obstacles that hinder the usage of mutation testing is its impracticality, two main contributors of this are a large number of mutants and a large number of test cases involves in the process. Researcher usually tries to address this problem by optimizing the mutants and the test case separately. In this research, we try to tackle both of optimizing mutant and optimizing test-case simultaneously using a coevolution optimization method. The coevolution optimization method is chosen for the mutation testing problem because the method works by optimizing multiple collections (population) of a solution. This research found that coevolution is better suited for multi-problem optimization than other single population methods (i.e. Genetic Algorithm), we also propose new indicator to determine the optimal coevolution cycle. The experiment is done to the artificial case, laboratory, and also a real case.