Thursday
Room 2
15:00 - 16:00
(UTC+10)
Talk (60 min)
Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)
How good is your test suite? Would it all still pass if the tested code was changed? If so, there may be problems with your code, your tests, or both!
Mutation Testing reveals these cases. It makes lots of slightly altered versions of your code, called "mutants". If any mutants let all of the code's tests pass, that implies certain flaws.
This talk will tell you what mutation testing is, how it works, how to use it, and its benefits, drawbacks, inner workings, and history. There will be some examples, and a list of tools for many popular languages.
You will come away equipped with a powerful new technique for making sure your tests are strict and your code is meaningful!
Dave Aronson
Dave is a semi-retired software development consultant (writing code *and* giving advice about it), with 37 years of professional experience in a wide variety of languages, systems, frameworks, techniques, domains, etc. He is the T. Rex of Codosaurus, LLC (his one-person consulting firm, which explains how he can get such a cool title, at https://www.Codosaur.us/) near Washington, DC, USA. His main focus in software lately is to spread the gospel of quality, including defining what that even means, and talking about techniques to achieve it. In his spare time, he makes mead and teaches others how.