News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites.

Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by dogweather on Thursday August 20, 2020 @02:14PM (#24226497)
The logic of refactoring test code is very interesting: IMO one can't just do that, because it tosses out the guarantee that it still tests what one thinks it does.

So I actually break my application first to make the tests fail, and then refactor them while failing to ensure that they still fail. Finally, I undo my changes to the app code, and the tests should all pass again. I guess this is essentially a manually performed mutation test.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Mutation Testing: A Tale of Two Suites by DylanSp on Thursday August 20, 2020 @08:08PM (#24230469)
I do the same thing, either when refactoring test code or when I'm adding tests after writing the implementation. I've heard the manual approach referred to as "refactoring against the red bar"; see https://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/09/20/refactoring-against-t....
[ Parent | on HN ]