Speaker
Description
The standard metric for testing and is widely used in R packages, for instance with testthat or tinytest. However, coverage can often be misleading: 100% coverage does not mean the absence of bugs, and line covered with a test does not mean that all behaviours flowing through this line are effectively verified.
This presentation introduces MutatoR, a new package designed to bring mutation testing to the R ecosystem. Mutation testing evaluates the quality of a test suite by injecting small, intentional errors, called mutants, into the source code (for example, changing a + to a - or > to >=). If the existing tests fail to detect these changes, the mutant survives, revealing a weakness in the test suite: the more the surviving mutants, the smaller the mutation score, and the less effective the test suite.
MutatoR is tailored to the R language and automates the generation, execution and analysis of these mutants. It can scale to large test suites by parallelizing across mutants, or capping the number of mutants when there are enough to compute a precise enough mutation score, and aims at providing a correct mutation score by detecting equivalent mutants.
The presentation will demonstrate the MutatoR workflow and discuss how to interpret mutation scores and mutants on some representative CRAN packages.
Additional Material or Paper
The package repository: https://github.com/PRL-PRG/MutatoR
If you used AI tools or services to support the preparation of this submission, please state the name and reason for using each of them.
GitHub Copilot: help for refactoring or doing menial tasks during the package development
| Keywords: Please list up to 5 keywords to help us find the right session for your contribution. | software quality, unit testing, testthat, mutation testing, reliability |
|---|---|
| Virtual Option | This submission is for onsite presentation only |
| Video Recording | Video sharing is fine |
| The author(s) agree(s) to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the submission and is/are authorized to present it. | Confirm |
| Interested in serving as reviewer? | pierre.donat.bouillud@gmail.com |