Mutation Analysis

Mutation Analysis (MA) is a field of Computer Science involving the mutation of source code by introducing randomly generated pieces of code or modifying existing pieces of code. Usually, the purpose of this is to locate weaknesses in the test data used for the program or sections of the code which are seldom or never accessed during execution.

Pioneered in the 1970 s, MA was origionally intended to locate and expose weaknesses in testing suites. The theory was that if a mutation was introduced without the behaviour (generally output) of the program being affected, this indicated either that the code that had been mutated was never executed (redundant code) or that the testing suite was unable to locate the bug. In order for this to function at any scale, a large number of mutations had to be introduced into a large program, leading to the compilation and execution of an extremely large number of pieces of code. This main problem with Mutation Analysis, the processor time required to preform it at any scale, meant that it was never widely adopted as a method of software engineering.

Recently, with the availability of massive computing power, there has been a resurgence of mutation analysis within computer science community, and work has been done to define methods to apply MA to object oriented programming languages.