Mutation testing of spreadsheets

Abstract

We present a catalog of mutation operators for spreadsheets drawn from research into mutation testing for general purpose programming languages and from spreadsheet errors that have been reported in literature. These operators are integrated into a system, called μTest, which allows users to create and maintain spreadsheet test cases. Three approaches to handling regions within spreadsheets are discussed, and we present a case study of how our system can be used to carry out mutation testing of spreadsheets. In addition to being useful in mutation testing of spreadsheets, the operators can be used in evaluation of error-detection tools and also for seeding spreadsheets with errors for empirical studies.