EMVille: A gamification-based approach to address the equivalent mutant problem

Abstract

Mutation testing is known as an effective method for evaluating test sets in terms of their error-revealing capability. When applying mutation testing, it is necessary to identify and filter out the equivalent mutants, i.e. mutants that despite their syntactical difference have the same semantic as the original program. Due to the undecidable nature of the problem of determining whether two programs are equivalent, it is not possible to totally eliminate the need for manual analysis of the mutants by the experts. Since this is a demanding task, it is required to provide both computational and motivational support for the experts involved in this analysis. This paper proposes a gamification-based approach for improving the process of addressing the equivalent mutant problem by encouraging the experts to get involved in solving instances of this problem.