Speeding-up mutation testing via data compression and state infection

Mutation testing is widely considered as a high-end test criterion due to the vast number of mutants it generates. Although many efforts have been made to reduce the computational cost of mutation testing, its scalability issue remains in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to speed up mutation testing based on state infection information. In addition to filtering out uninfected test executions, we further select a subset of mutants and a subset of test cases to run leveraging data-compression techniques. In particular, we adopt Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) to group similar mutants together and then select test cases to cover these mutants. To evaluate our method, we conducted an experimental study on six open source Java projects. We used EvoSuite to automatically generate test cases and to collect mutation data. The initial results show that our method can reduce the execution time by 83.93% with only 0.257% loss in precision.