Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites

Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by taeric on Thursday August 20, 2020 @01:33PM (#24225960)

I've tried to get mutation testing going on my last few projects. Amusing how little faith/interest there is in this from most of my colleagues. Would be interested in hearing how folks keep this up in a project.

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Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by dogweather on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:18PM (#24226551)

It's probably most important in language ecosystems like Ruby which seriously depend on test suites for catching bugs.

One way to view the problem that Mutation Testing solves is, there's no test suite for the test suite. And so there's no safety net to enable refactoring the test code. It's test suites all the way down.

Mutation testing solves this infinite recursion problem by automating the test-suite-test-suite creation.

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Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by taeric on Thursday August 20, 2020 @04:55PM (#24228835)

Yeah, I pitched it as a way to know how good your tests are at catching common bugs. Still no dice.

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Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by release-object on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:36PM (#24238620)

Did you considered doing it anyway? If a one-off run reveals some previously unknown flaw in the test suite you could present that.

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Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by taeric on Saturday August 22, 2020 @11:25PM (#24249278)

Apologies for not seeing this.

I have added it. It got removed for adding to the build time. Never really found many issues, so I couldn't argue to keep it. Did point out that the argument was essentially against testing.

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