Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC '10),
IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (2010)

Correlating Context-Awareness and Mutation Analysis
for Pervasive Computing Systems
1

Huai Wang 2 , Ke Zhai 2 , and T.H. Tse 3

[paper from IEEE Xplore | paper from IEEE digital library | technical report TR-2010-03]

 ABSTRACT

Pervasive computing systems often use middleware as a means to communicate with the changing environment. However, the interactions with the context-aware middleware as well as the interactions among applications sharing the same middleware may introduce faults that are difficult to reveal by existing testing techniques. Our previous work proposed the notion of context diversity as a metric to measure the degree of changes in test inputs for pervasive software. In this paper, we present a case study on how much context diversity for test cases relates to fault-based mutants in pervasive software. Our empirical results show that conventional mutation operators can generate sufficient candidate mutants to support test effectiveness evaluation of pervasive software, and test cases with higher context diversity values tend to have higher mean mutation scores. On the other hand, for test cases sharing the same context diversity, their mutation scores can vary significantly in terms of standard derivations.

Keywords: context diversity; mutation analysis; pervasive computing

1. This research is supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 716507 and 717308).
2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
3. (Corresponding author.)
Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
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