PMothra: scheduling mutants for execution on a hypercube

ABSTRACT

Reliable software testing is a time consuming operation. In addition to the time spent by the tester in identifying, locating, and correcting bugs, a significant time is spent in the execution of the program under test and its instrumented or fault induced variants. When using mutation based testing to achieve high reliability, the number of such variants can be very large. In this paper we describe the architecture of a tool named PMothra that is designed to provide an architecture-transparent interface to a tester. In its current version, PMothra exploits the hypercube architecture by scheduling the execution of mutants on a 128-node Ncube/7 hypercube.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.1 Formal Definitions and Theory
          Subjects: Semantics

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)
          Subjects: Multiple-instruction-stream, multiple-data-stream processors (MIMD)

  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Reliability
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.1 Process Management
          Subjects: Scheduling

General Terms:
Algorithms, Reliability