Mutation Operators for Mutation Testing of Angular Web Applications Mutation Operators für Mutationstests von eckigen Webanwendungen

Augustin, Sarah; Winkelmann, Hendrik; Kuchen, Herbert

Abstract

Mutation testing is an approach for assessing the quality of a test suite by using mutation operators to insert changes into the code and then checking whether the test suite can detect the inserted changes. Due to the growing prevalence and complexity of web applications, the importance of web testing has increased, making mutation testing a potentially beneficial approach for web applications. Since in web applications, mostly web-specific mistakes and not generic mistakes occur, the question arises, to whether new mutation operators simulating such realistic, web-specific mistakes perform better than the traditional, generic mutation operators. The work at hand addresses this question by developing new mutation operators specific to the client-side TypeScript code of Angular web applications and evaluating how they perform in comparison to the traditional mutation operators. The findings indicate that the new web-specific mutation operators introduce fewer, more realistic, and har der-to-kill mutants than the traditional mutation operators, thus being a promising approach for assessing the test suite quality of web applications.