C++11/14 Mutation Operators Based on Common Fault Patterns

Abstract: The C++11/14 standard offers a wealth of features aimed at helping programmers write better code. Unfortunately, some of these features may cause subtle programming faults, likely to go unnoticed during code reviews. In this paper we propose four new mutation operators for C++11/14 based on common fault patterns, which allow to verify whether a unit test suite is capable of testing against such faults. We validate the relevance of the proposed mutation operators by performing a case study on seven real-life software systems.