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Top1. Introduction
Mutation testing is an established white box fault based testing method often overlooked for its laborious and exhaustive execution of test suites. Seeding of faults at known points, to trying to kill mutants by constantly increasing the input size, to analyzing the dead mutants versus the live mutants tests the typical tester’s time constraints (Woodward 1993). If a mutant is alive, the test is re-executed with an increase in the sample input size. If a mutant is alive despite increasing the input size, then the tester needs to enhance his test suite with a new test case incorporating the live mutant as the new mutation operator. Mutation testing not just helps thorough testing of the software in test but also helps in enhancement of test suite to cater to the future needs like regression testing and health testing of the software in test, be it a web application or any application. However, a thorough effort went into understanding the needs of a web application in testing in the current work and a consolidated effort concluded that web application testing becomes critical given its immense heterogeneity in terms of interactions, implementations, languages, etc (Lakshmi & Millika 2017).
Some of the popular case studies which emphasized on the importance of proper testing of web applications and implications of a poorly tested application are as below.
Pricing error on Amazon’s UK site lists iPaq H1910 Pocket PC for under $12 instead of regular retail price of $449 resulting in abnormally high sales in March 2003 (News.com n.d).
PayPal suffered from service outages for five days in October 2004 after upgrading site. They reason quoted to be as glitches in the software update and waived customer fees for a day http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1684427,00.asp (eWeek.com n.d.).
A bank in Denmark experiences outage due to errors in database recovery routines following replacement of defective disk in April 2003 (eWeek.com n.d.).
Comair airlines had to cancel more than 1,000 flights on Christmas Day 2004 when its computer systems for reservations crashed after a rough weather caused a damage to the physical computer systems of the organization (Internetnews.com n.d.).
Earlier researchers have done some extensive work in terms of proposing mutation operators for testing web applications (Kumar 2019; Kumar & Ramamoorthy 2018; Offutt et al., 2006; Praphamontripong & Offutt 2010; Kumar & Ramamoorthy 2017; Schuler & Zeller 2009; Schuler et al., 2009). However, there is a dearth for security related mutation operators which can further reveal security vulnerabilities of web applications (Lakshmi & Mallika 2017).