Mutant Density: A Measure of Fault-Sensitive Complexity

Abstract

Software code complexity is a well-studied property to determine software component health. However, the existing code complexity metrics do not directly take into account the fault-proneness aspect of the code. We propose a metric called mutant density where we use mutation as a method to introduce artificial faults in code, and count the number of possible mutations per line. We show how this metric can be used to perform helpful analysis of real-life software projects.

References in corpus (2)

• Evaluating Random Mutant Selection at Class-Level in Projects with Non-Adequate Test Suites
• Do Null-Type Mutation Operators Help Prevent Null-Type Faults?