Extending the Bacterio tool for web application mutation testing

Mutation is a testing technique that, after many years of application in the academic and research environments, has recently started to be applied in industry. The main obstacle for its industrial adoption has been the high costs associated to its three stages: mutant generation, execution of tests cases against mutants and result analysis. In the same way, the techniques that researchers have developed to alleviate these costs are the main reason for its acceptation. In spite of this, the application of mutation is reduced to the testing of the internal layers of systems, and not of the external ones, such as the GUI. Since current trends in software construction mainly involve the development of web and mobile applications, we have extended the Bacterio tool for web application testing using mutation. This paper deals with the integration of the mutant schema technique in Bacterio as a way to efficiently execute mutation testing of web applications. Moreover, a new component has been included to control the execution of the test cases within the web server.