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Extending mutation testing to find environmental bugs
Author(s) -
Spafford Eugene H.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.4380200205
Subject(s) - computer science , mutation , software bug , extension (predicate logic) , simple (philosophy) , software , reliability engineering , programming language , biology , engineering , genetics , gene , philosophy , epistemology
Environmental bugs are bugs caused by limitations of precision or capacity in the environment of a piece of software. These bugs may be difficult to activate and even more difficult to find. This paper reports on an extension to traditional mutation testing that enables testing specifically for environmental bugs involving integer arithmetic. This method is both simple and effective, and provides some insight into other possible extensions of the mutation‐testing methodology that can be used to expose environmental bugs.