Mutant Density: A Measure of Fault-Sensitive Complexity

04/25/2021

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by   Ali Parsai, et al.

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Software code complexity is a well-studied property to determine software component health. However, the existing code complexity metrics do not directly take into account the fault-proneness aspect of the code. We propose a metric called mutant density where we use mutation as a method to introduce artificial faults in code, and count the number of possible mutations per line. We show how this metric can be used to perform helpful analysis of real-life software projects.