PMothra: scheduling mutants for execution on a hypercube

Reliable software testing is a time consuming operation. In addition to the time spent by the tester in identifying, locating, and correcting bugs, a significant time is spent in the execution of the program under test and its instrumented or fault induced variants. When using mutation based testing to achieve high reliability, the number of such variants can be very large. In this paper we describe the architecture of a tool named P M othra that is designed to provide an architecture-transparent interface to a tester. In its current version, P M othra exploits the hypercube architecture by scheduling the execution of mutants on a 128-node Ncube/7 hypercube.