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Mutation Testing with Python
Test the tests — automatically, by applying common mistakes
We need to kill the mutants — no, I’m not a villain from the X-Men comics. I’m a software engineer who wants to improve unit tests.
In this article you will learn what mutation testing is and how it can help you to write better tests. The examples are for Python, but the concepts hold in general and in the end I have a list of tools in other languages.
Why do we need mutation testing?
Unit tests have the issue that it’s unclear when your tests are good enough. Do you cover the important edge cases? How do you test the quality of your unit tests?
Typical mistakes are slight confusions. Accessing list[i] instead of list[i-1] , letting the loop run for i < n instead of i <= n , initializing a variable with None instead of the empty string. There are a lot of those slight changes which are usually just called “typos” or “off-by-one” mistakes. When I make them, I often didn’t think about the part thoroughly enough.
Mutation testing tests your unit tests. The key idea is to apply those minor changes and run the unit tests that could fail. If a unit test fails, the mutant was killed. Which is what we want. It shows that this kind of off-by-one mistake…
