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Mutation Testing

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As Bradford couldn't make it last time, we are glad that he will give his Mutation Testing session in April.

Speaker: Bradford Hovinen (https://www.softwerkskammer.org/members/hovinen)

How do we know whether our tests are good enough?

One common measure is code coverage, but it has its limits: one can take any test suite providing good coverage, remove all of the assertions, and still have good coverage. The resulting test suite will, however, be next to useless.

The only real way to know whether our tests are doing their job is to see what happens when our code breaks. This is the idea behind mutation testing: we deliberately introduce defects into productive code and then see which tests (if any) break as a result. If a real defect is introduced and no tests break, then we know that our tests are inadequate.

In this session there will be a short presentation on the technique followed by some exercises to try it out by hand. Time permitting, we will try out an automated tool for doing mutation testing in Java.

Hands-on programming language(s)

Java

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing

See you at the Softwerkskammer.

David

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