Abstract
Testing multi-agent systems is a challenge, since by definition such systems are distributed, and are able to exhibit autonomous and flexible behaviour. One specific challenge in testing agent programs is developing a collection of tests (a “test suite”) that is adequate for testing a given agent program. In order to develop an adequate test suite, it is clearly important to be able to assess the adequacy of a given test suite. A well-established technique for assessing this is the use of mutation testing, where mutation operators are used to generate variants (“mutants”) of a given program, and a test suite is then assessed in terms of its ability to detect (“kill”) the mutants. However, work on mutation testing has focussed largely on the mutation of procedural and object-oriented languages. This paper is the first to propose a set of mutation operators for a cognitive agent-oriented programming language, specifically Goal. Our mutation operators are systematically derived, and are also guided by an exploration of the bugs found in a collection of undergraduate programming assignments written in Goal. In fact, in exploring these programs we also provide an additional contribution: evidence of the extent to which the two foundational hypotheses of mutation testing hold for Goal programs.
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Savarimuthu, S., Winikoff, M. (2013). Mutation Operators for the Goal Agent Language. In: Cossentino, M., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Winikoff, M. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8245. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45343-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45343-4_14
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