skip to main content
10.1145/2931037.2948707acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesisstaConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

PIT: a practical mutation testing tool for Java (demo)

Published:18 July 2016Publication History

ABSTRACT

Mutation testing introduces artificial defects to measure the adequacy of testing. In case candidate tests can distinguish the behaviour of mutants from that of the original program, they are considered of good quality -- otherwise developers need to design new tests. While, this method has been shown to be effective, industry-scale code challenges its applicability due to the sheer number of mutants and test executions it requires. In this paper we present PIT, a practical mutation testing tool for Java, applicable on real-world codebases. PIT is fast since it operates on bytecode and optimises mutant executions. It is also robust and well integrated with development tools, as it can be invoked through a command line interface, Ant or Maven. PIT is also open source and hence, publicly available at \url{http://pitest.org/}

References

  1. P. Amman. Transforming mutation testing from the technology of the future into the technology of the present, https://sites.google.com/site/mutationworkshop2015/ program/mutationkeynote.pdf.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. J. H. Andrews, L. C. Briand, Y. Labiche, and A. S. Namin. Using mutation analysis for assessing and comparing testing coverage criteria. TSE, 32(8). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. M. Delahaye and L. du Bousquet. Selecting a software engineering tool: lessons learnt from mutation analysis. SPE, 45(7). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Y. Jia and M. Harman. An analysis and survey of the development of mutation testing. TSE, 37(5). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. R. Just. The major mutation framework: efficient and scalable mutation analysis for java. In ISSTA. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. T. Laurent, A. Ventresque, M. Papadakis, C. Henard, and Y. L. Traon. Assessing and improving the mutation testing practice of PIT. CoRR, abs/1601.02351, 2016.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Y. Ma, J. Offutt, and Y. R. Kwon. Mujava: a mutation system for java. In ICSE. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. A. S. Namin and S. Kakarla. The use of mutation in testing experiments and its sensitivity to external threats. In ISSTA. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. A. J. Offutt, A. Lee, G. Rothermel, R. H. Untch, and C. Zapf. An Experimental Determination of Sufficient Mutant Operators. TOSEM, 5, 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. M. Papadakis, C. Henard, M. Harman, Y. Jia, and Y. L. Traon. Threats to the validity of mutation-based test assessment. In ISSTA, 2016. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. PIT: a practical mutation testing tool for Java (demo)

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      ISSTA 2016: Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
      July 2016
      452 pages
      ISBN:9781450343909
      DOI:10.1145/2931037

      Copyright © 2016 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 18 July 2016

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • short-paper

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate58of213submissions,27%

      Upcoming Conference

      ISSTA '24

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader