Cerebro: Static Subsuming Mutant Selection

Abstract: Mutation testing research has indicated that a major part of its application cost is due to the large number of low utility mutants that it introduces. Although previous research has identified this issue, no previous study has proposed any effective solution to the problem. Thus, it remains unclear how to mutate and test a given piece of code in a best effort way, i.e., achieving a good trade-off between invested effort and test effectiveness. To achieve this, we propose Cerebro, a machine learning approach that statically selects subsuming mutants, i.e., the set of mutants that resides on the top of the subsumption hierarchy, based on the mutants' surrounding code context. We evaluate Cerebro using 48 and 10 programs written in C and Java, respectively, and demonstrate that it preserves the mutation testing benefits while limiting application cost, i.e., reduces all cost application factors such as equivalent mutants, mutant executions, and the mutants requiring analysis. We demonstrate that Cerebro has strong inter-project prediction ability, which is significantly higher than two baseline methods, i.e., supervised learning on features proposed by state-of-the-art, and random mutant selection. More importantly, our results show that Cerebro's selected mutants lead to strong tests that are respectively capable of killing 2 times higher than the number of subsuming mutants killed by the baselines when selecting the same number of mutants. At the same time, Cerebro reduces the cost-related factors, as it selects, on average, 68% fewer equivalent mutants, while requiring 90% fewer test executions than the baselines.