Mutation Testing

Mutation testing is a technique of measuring test suite effectiveness. The idea is:

  1. Execute the test suite to ensure all tests succeed
  2. make a small change to the implementation code (introduce a bug)
  3. execute the test suite to check whether any test fails (and therefore catches the bug)

This mitigates the problem of traditional test coverage measurement techniques.

1 Advantages

1.1 Actually measure whether tests catch bugs

2 Disadvantages

2.1 Slow

2.2 Needs good mutators

3 Backlinks   backlinks