A Declarative Framework for Hand-Crafted Mutation Analysis and Management

Abstract

Hand-crafted mutants are increasingly used to evaluate fuzzing and property-based testing tools, but current tooling is fragmented and often forces trade-offs between readability, mutation preservation, and execution cost. We present a declarative framework for hand-crafted mutation analysis and management. First, we characterize five mutation representations: comment-based, preprocessor-based, patch-based, match-and-replace, and in-AST mutations. Second, we define a mutation algebra that supports selective execution, tag-based expansion, and higher-order combinations of mutants. Third, we describe a lossless conversion pipeline that maps mutation representations through a common intermediate form, including a strategy for extracting and normalizing in-AST mutations. We implement these ideas in Marauder, a prototype system for injecting, activating, resetting, and composing hand-crafted mutants across representations. This framework clarifies the design space of hand-crafted mutation systems and provides a practical foundation for more efficient and expressive mutation experiments.