Nathan Thompson walks us through a mutation testing experiment:
Since our hypothesis was that the implementation differences between Jasmine and Jest could affect the Mutation Score of our legacy and new test suites, we began by cataloging every bit of Jasmine-specific syntax in our legacy suite. We then compiled a list of roughly forty test files that we would target for Mutation Testing in order to cover the full syntax catalog. For each file we generated a Mutation Score for its legacy state, converted it to run in our new Jest setup, and generated a Mutation Score again. Our hope was that the new Jest framework would have a Mutation Score as good as or better than our legacy framework.
By limiting the scope of our test to just a few dozen files, we were able to run all mutations Stryker had to offer within a reasonable timeframe. However, the sheer size of our codebase and the sprawling dependency trees in any given feature presented other challenges to this work. As I mentioned before, Stryker copies the source code to be mutated into separate sandbox directories. By default, it copies the entire project into each sandbox, but that was too much for Node.js to handle in our repository:
In my undergrad days, I loved mutation testing mostly because of the terminology. I’m happy to see a proper implementation of mutation testing and I’m even happier to see that they have a .NET version.