Seite - 147 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

ChasingMutants AdamLeon Smith Abstract This chapter describes mutation testing, how it has developed, the types of tools associated with it, the benefits to a quality assurance process, and the associated challenges with scaling it as a test design technique and as a consumer of resources. Keywords Software testing · Softwarequality · Test automation · Mutation testing 1 Introduction It’s hard to prove a negative, and if you are reading this book, you are likely to be aware that testing proves the presenceofdefects, rather than the absence.Mutation testing turns this principle on its head and asks, if we know there are defects, what doour test results tellusabout thequalityofoursoftwareand tests? As engineers increasingly turn to more automated software verification approaches and higher quality software outputs are demanded by ever-reducing release timelines, mutation testing helps us take a step back to assess whether we should reallybesoconfident in our tests. I asked Markus Schirp, author of Mutant [1], a mutation testing tool for Ruby, howhe definedmutation testing: Mutation testing is theprocess ofheuristically determining semantics ofyour program that are not covered by tests.—Markus Schirp With most software testing approaches, it is hard to determine if you can detect failures in the testing process until the failures occur in a later testing activity, or A.L.Smith Dragonfly, London, UK ©The Author(s) 2020 S.Goericke (ed.), The Future of Software QualityAssurance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29509-7_12 147