MutAPK 2.0: a tool for reducing mutation testing effort of Android apps

Mutation testing is a time consuming process because large sets of fault-injected-versions of an original app are generated and executed with the purpose of evaluating the quality of a given test suite. In the case of Android apps, recent studies even suggest that mutant generation and mutation testing effort could be greater when the mutants are generated at the APK level. To reduce that effort, useless (e.g., equivalent) mutants should be avoided and mutant selection techniques could be used to reduce the set of mutants used with mutation testing. However, despite the existence of mutation testing tools, none of those tools provides features for removing useless mutants and sampling mutant sets. In this paper, we present MutAPK 2.0, an improved version of our open source mutant generation tool (MutAPK) for Android apps at APK level. To the best of our knowledge, MutAPK 2.0 is the first tool that enables the removal of dead-code mutants, provides a set of mutant selection strategies, and removes automatically equivalent and duplicate mutants. MutAPK 2.0 is publicly available at GitHub: https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/MutAPK/ VIDEO: https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/MutAPK/video.html