Mutation Operators for Decision Table-Based Contracts Used in Software Testing

Abstract

The Design by Contract technique allows developers to improve source code with contracts, and testing using contracts helps to identify faults. However, the source code of the program under test is not always available. With black-box testing, it is possible to generate contracts from specifications of the software. In this paper, we apply mutation analysis on a model of a given specifications, where mutants are initially gained by applying proposed in this paper certain mutation operators on corresponding model, and then mutated specifications are examined.