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Last updated on Thursday, November 16, 2023
@article{Parsai2020MutationExperience,
author = {Ali Parsai and Serge Demeyer},
journal = {International Journal on Software Tools for
Technology Transfer},
month = may,
publisher = {Springer Verlag},
title = {Comparing mutation coverage against branch coverage
in an industrial setting},
year = {2020},
abstract = {The state-of-the-practice in software development is
driven by constant change fueled by continues
integration servers. Such constant change demands for
frequent and fully automated tests capable to detect
faults immediately upon project build. As the fault
detection capability of the test suite becomes so
important, modern software development teams
continuously monitor the quality of the test suite as
well. However, it appears that the
state-of-the-practice is reluctant to adopt strong
coverage metrics (namely mutation coverage), instead
relying on weaker kinds of coverage (namely branch
coverage). In this paper, we investigate three
reasons that prohibit the adoption of mutation
coverage in a continuous integration setting: (1) the
difficulty of its integration into the build system,
(2) the perception that branch coverage is ``good
enough'', and (3) the performance overhead during the
build. Our investigation is based on a case study
involving four open source systems and one industrial
system. We demonstrate that mutation coverage reveals
additional weaknesses in the test suite compared to
branch coverage and that it is able to do so with an
acceptable performance overhead during project
build.},
annote = {internationaljournal},
doi = {10.1007/s10009-020-00567-y},
}