Introduction to mutation testing with PIT and TestNG

Marcin ZajaczkowskiApril 2nd, 2012Last Updated: October 21st, 2012

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Mutation testing is a technique which allows to discover which parts of our code are not covered by tests. It is similar to a code coverage, but mutation testing is not limited to the fact that a given line was executed during tests. The idea is to modify the production code (introduce mutations) which should change its behavior (produce different results) and cause unit tests to fail. The lack of the failure may indicate that given part was not covered good enough by the tests. The idea of mutation testing is quite old, but it is rather unpopular. Despite the fact I am rather experienced in testing I found it just recently reviewing a beta version of the new book about testing.

PIT is “a fast bytecode based mutation testing system for Java that makes it possible to test the effectiveness of your unit tests”. It is a very young project, but very promising. It offers a set of mutation operators which among others modify conditional statements, mathematical operations, return values and methods calls.

Starting with the recently released version 0.25 PIT (experimentally) supports TestNG based tests (in addition to JUnit based). To use it from Maven it is required to add pitest-maven plugin to pom.xml:

<plugin>
    <plugin>
    <groupid>org.pitest</groupid>
    <artifactid>pitest-maven</artifactid>
    <version>0.25</version>
</plugin>
</plugin>

In many cases it would be enough. inScopeClasses (mutable classes and tests for running) and targetClasses (only candidates for mutation) by default use project groupId and usually can be omitted. There are several options that can be configured in the plugin configuration. “mvn org.pitest:pitest-maven:mutationCoverage” performs modified tests and generates mutation report which by default is saved in target/pit-reports/yyMMddHHmm directory.

A sample report (click to enlarge) for a specified class shows both line coverage and mutation coverage. Despite 100% line coverage (lines with light green background), PIT found that a test data set does not cover properly boundary conditions.