White-Box Mutation Testing of Smart Contracts: A Quick Review

Once being deployed on the blockchain, smart contracts cannot be altered, requiring more testing. A fault-based testing technique called mutation testing (MT) can significantly increase the utility of a test for smart contracts. MT is a type of white-box testing which is mainly used for unit testing. In fact, certain statements of the source code are changed to check if the test cases are able to find errors in source code. The main objective of MT is ensuring the quality of test cases in terms of robustness in the way that it should fail the mutated source code. In this paper, our goal is to identify and classify the main applications of mutation testing of smart contracts by providing a quick review on the application perspective of mutation testing based on a collection of several papers. In particular, we analysed in which quality assurance processes mutation testing of smart contracts is used, which mutation tools and which mutation operators are employed.