Concurrency Bug-Oriented Mutation Operators Design for Java

Abstract

Multi-threads and concurrent processing has been backbone of software system in the era of big data and cloud computing. However, concurrent processing of software brings not only high computing efficiency but also intricate bug types. Concurrency bug is one of the most notorious. With the purpose of improving concurrent system quality with mutation testing, this paper presents a set of concurrency mutation operators for the latest java version as mutation operator is the basis of mutation testing. We firstly carefully study the concurrency characteristic of java language and its programs, and extract the key factors of concurrent processing. After that, we analyze the existing mutation operators and design new ones according to the extracted concurrency factors of java 8. Finally, we optimize the initially designed 28 mutation operators to 26 through experimental evaluation.