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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Programming
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Pit testing is useful. It basically tests how effective your tests are and tells you missed conditions that aren’t being tested. For Java. https://pitest.org
Every enterprise I’ve consulted for that had code coverage requirements was full of elaborate mock-heavy tests with a single Assert.NotNull at the end. Basically just testing that you wrote the right mocks!
That’s exactly the sort of shit tests mutation testing is designed to address. Believe me it sucks when sonar requires 90% pit test pass rate. Sometimes the tests can get extremely elaborate. Which should be a red flag for design (not necessarily bad code).
Anyway I love what pit testing does. I hate being required to do it, but it’s a good thing.
Yeah. All the same. Create lazy metric - get lazy and useless results.
This is really interesting, I've never heard of such an approach before; clearly I need to spend more time reading up on testing methodologies. Thank you!
Does something like this exist for Python?
https://mutatest.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I'd never heard of mutation testing before either, and it seems really interesting. It reminds me of fuzzing, except for the code instead of the input. Maybe a little impractical for some codebases with long build times though. Still, I'll have to give it a try for a future project. It looks like there's several tools for mutation testing C/C++.
The most useful tests I write are generally regression tests. Every time I find a bug, I'll replicate it in a test case, then fix the bug. I think this is just basic Test-Driven-Development practice, but it's very useful to verify that your tests actually fail when they should. Mutation/Pit testing seems like it addresses that nicely.
We are running the above pi tests with an extra (Gradle based) build plugin so that it only runs mutations for the changed lines in that pull request. That drastically reduces runtime and still ensures that new code is covered to the mutation test level we want. Maybe something similar can be done for C or C++ projects.