New mutation operator: SBR (Statement Block Removal)

[ligurio]

I soon noticed that the SBR (Statement Block Removal) mutator, which deletes statements or whole blocks, is the most common one, and that made sense: while mutating a logical or arithmetic operator required the existence of such an operator in the code to be mutated, any line of code was eligible for deletion. Mutants generated by code deletion, though, did not have the best reported usefulness, or productivity. In fact, almost all other mutators generated more productive mutants than the SBR, and that got me thinking: not all code is the same; a condition within an if statement that contains a return statement is not the same as a condition in another location.

Source: https://testing.googleblog.com/2021/04/mutation-testing.html