Automated Generation of Pointcut Mutants for Testing Pointcuts in AspectJ Programs

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) provides new modularization of software systems by encapsulating crosscutting concerns. AspectJ, an AOP language, uses abstractions such as pointcuts, advice, and aspects to achieve AOP’s primary functionality. Faults in pointcuts can cause aspects to fail to satisfy their requirements. Hence, testing pointcuts is necessary in order to ensure correctness of aspects. In mutation testing of pointcuts (a type of faultbased pointcut testing), the number of mutants (i.e., variations) for pointcuts is usually large due to the usage of wildcards. It is tedious to manually identify effective mutants that are of appropriate strength and resemble closely the original pointcut expression, reflecting the kind of mistakes that developers may make. To reduce developers’ effort in this process, we have developed a new framework that automatically identifies the strength of each pointcut and generates pointcut mutants with different strengths. Developers can in...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Prasanth Anbalagan, Tao Xie
• Keywords: ISSRE 2008, Mutants, Pointcut, Pointcut Mutants, Software Engineering