Catching bugs with Mutation Testing

Presenter: Mike Papadakis, University of Luxembourg
Date: 10 January 2024

Abstract

Mutation testing realises the idea of injecting and observing the consequences of artificially seeded faults in given systems. The approach is powerful as it allows revealing real faults, identifying weaknesses, simulating the effects of failures, estimating systems robustness and performing controlled studies. Mutation testing has reached a maturity phase and gradually gains popularity both in academia and in industry. This talk will present the main concepts, will introduce the key advances and will discuss open challenges and future research directions around mutation testing.

Biography

Mike Papadakis is an Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg where he leads the SERVAL (SEcurity, Reasoning and VALidation) research team. His research interests include software testing, code analysis and artificial inteligence for software engineering. He is best known for his work on Mutation Testing for which he has been awarded IEEE TCSE Rising Star Award 2020. He has been General Chair of the ACM SIGSOFT ISSTA 2025 and IEEE ICSME 2021 and Program Chair of SSBSE 2021 and IEEE ICST 2022. He also serves at the editorial and review boards of international Software Engineering journals (STVR, Empirical Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology) and has co-authored of more than 100 publications in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals. His work has been supported by Facebook, FNR, CETREL (SIX group company), BGL (BNP Paribas), Microsoft and PayPal.