Seeding Bugs to Find Bugs: Beautiful Mutation Testing
by
Andreas Zeller, David Schuler
Tim Riley, Adam Goucher (Ed.), Beautiful Testing, Chapter 18, O'Reilly Media, Inc., October 2009.
ISBN: 9780596159818
See also
More information is available at http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159825.
Abstract
Suppose you are a test manager of a software project. You are at the end of a development cycle: all the new features are there, and all the tests have passed. Now is the time for you to decide: Are you ready for release?
In principle, everything should be settled, as all tests have passed. However, the fact that all your tests have passed may not mean much if your test suite is not good enough. If your test suite does not properly check the program outcome, for instance, your tests may pass even though the result is wrong. So, how can you check whether your test suite is effective in finding defects? In this chapter, we shall explore a simple, elegant, and indeed beautiful way to test the quality of a test suite-namely by systematically seeding artificial defects into the program and checking whether the test suite finds them.
BibTeX Entry
@inbook{zeller-beautifultesting-2009,
title = "Seeding Bugs to Find Bugs: Beautiful Mutation Testing",
author = "Andreas Zeller and David Schuler",
year = "2009",
month = oct,
booktitle = "Beautiful Testing",
chapter = "18",
editors = "Tim Riley and Adam Goucher",
publisher = "O'Reilly Media, Inc.",
ISBN = "9780596159818",
}