Enhanced mutation testing of smart contracts in support of code inspection

Smart contracts hold the potential to revolutionize various industries, but their implementation requires thorough testing due to the associated financial risks. Mutation testing is a powerful technique that can boost the fault-detection capabilities of a test suite, but it can also foster a deeper understanding of smart contract behavior. This work investigates the productivity of mutants with respect to their capabilities in disclosing Solidity issues. Based on these findings, it proposes an enhanced mutation strategy to better assist smart contract auditors during code inspection activities. 9 novel mutation operators are introduced in this paper and 13 existing operators are improved. The results show a 30 % reduction in the number of generated mutants and time savings of 62 %, while increasing the set of productive mutants related to issues by 43 % overall. We note that the most valuable type of mutants that could help disclose an issue as a result of manual mutant inspection was increased by 125 %.