arrow
Return

Mutation Operators for Spreadsheets

delete2009-01-01
delete55
delete
OA
AI
R
Robin Abraham *
M
Martin Erwig
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2008.73delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Based on 1) research into mutation testing for general-purpose programming languages and 2) spreadsheet errors that have been reported in the literature, we have developed a suite of mutation operators for spreadsheets. We present an evaluation of the mutation adequacy of definition-use adequate test suites generated by a constraint-based automatic test-case generation system we have developed in previous work. The results of the evaluation suggest additional constraints that can be incorporated into the system to target mutation adequacy. In addition to being useful in mutation testing of spreadsheets, the operators can be used in the evaluation of error-detection tools and also for seeding spreadsheets with errors for empirical studies. We describe two case studies where the suite of mutation operators helped us carry out such empirical evaluations. The main contribution of this paper is a suite of mutation operators for spreadsheets that can be used for performing empirical evaluations of spreadsheet tools to indicate ways in which the tools can be improved.
Keywords:
End-user software engineering
spreadsheets
end-user programming

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering cover
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IF:
5.6
Papers:
2.8K
Citations:
1.1W

Organization

O
Oregon State University
Scholars:
1.7W
Papers: 1.5W
Citations: 2.4W
M
Microsoft
Scholars:
3.0K
Papers: 2.7K
Citations: 7