A web services-based architecture for mutation analysis of UML activity diagrams

Abstract

Mutation testing has been used to construct test cases and to evaluate the effectiveness of testing methods. Several methods have recently been proposed to generate test sequences from higher level design models such as UML state and activity diagrams. This paper presents a scalable web-services based architecture that can evaluate the effectiveness of these methods using mutation analysis. The architecture defines several mutation operators for activity diagrams based on the Hazmat classification. The paper also presents a case study using this architecture to evaluate automatically generated tests for designers. The architecture is implemented using the Apache Axis framework.