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Title: Mutation Testing and PIT
Proposer: Filip van Laenen
Proposer: Henry Coles
Type: Tutorial/Case-Study
Duration: 90 mins
Description:
Mutation testing is nothing new, but remarkably few programmers are familiar with the technique, and very few real world projects have ever used it. That's a pity, because mutation testing is a very powerful tool. Not only will it improve the quality of your code dramatically, it will also make you reflect more over your unit tests, the way you write code and the content of the source code.
This talk will start with an explanation of the basic idea of mutation testing, and how it fits in with other software quality techniques like unit testing, static code analysis and test coverage. An example will be given as an eye opener, at the same time illustrating how it works in practice. Then the talk will continue with an overview over the techniques used by mutation testing tools. We'll focus in particular on PIT, the mutation testing tool for Java, and cover things like the strategies used to create mutations, and how to select the unit tests that should be run on them. Finally, we'll discuss some of the experiences we gained from using PIT in the Norwegian evoting verification project and other projects.