Beautiful Testing

Odds and Ends

It was 30 years ago when the first paper on mutation testing was published. Only now, though, does mutation testing come of age. The reasons are manifold:

• Automated testing is much more widespread than it was 10 years ago, and there is no mutation testing without it.

• Computing power keeps on increasing, and we can begin to afford the huge computing requirements imposed by mutation testing.

• Modern test case generators make it fairly easy to obtain a high coverage automatically—but still, the test cases are not good enough.

• We have a variety of dynamic and static optimizations that make mutation testing reasonably efficient, and also highly effective when it comes to improving test suites.

All this implies that mutation testing will become much more commonplace in the future. It is therefore good news that the first scalable mutation testing tools are available for everyone to experiment with—and to experience the beauty of mutation testing.