  Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique for assessing the
fault-detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, mutation testing
consumes enormous computing resources because it runs the whole test suite for
each and every injected mutant. In this paper we explore fine-grained
traceability links at method level (named focal methods), to reduce the
execution time of mutation testing and to verify the quality of the test cases
for each individual method, instead of the usually verified overall test suite
quality. Validation of our approach on the open source Apache Ant project shows
a speed-up of 573.5x for the mutants located in focal methods with a quality
score of 80%.
