mutant

Mutant is a mutation testing tool for Ruby.

The idea is that if code can be changed and your tests do not notice, either that code isn't being covered or it does not have a speced side effect.

Mutant supports MRI and RBX 1.9, 2.0 and 2.1, while support for JRuby is planned. It should also work under any Ruby engine that supports POSIX-fork(2) semantics.

Mutant uses a pure Ruby parser and an unparser to do its magic.

Mutant does not have really good "getting started" documentation currently so please refer to presentations and blog posts below.

Mutation-Operators:

Mutant supports a wide range of mutation operators. An exhaustive list can be found in the mutant-meta. The mutant-meta is arranged to the AST-Node-Types of parser. Refer to parsers AST documentation in doubt.

There is no easy and universal way to count the number of mutation operators a tool supports.

Presentations

There are some presentations about mutant in the wild:

• RailsConf 2014 / http://confreaks.com/videos/3333-railsconf-mutation-testing-with-mutant
• Wrocloverb 2014 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz-lFKEioLk
• eurucamp 2013 / FrOSCon-2013 http://slid.es/markusschirp/mutation-testing
• Cologne.rb / https://github.com/DonSchado/colognerb-on-mutant/blob/master/mutation_testing_slides.pdf

Blog-Posts

• http://www.sitepoint.com/mutation-testing-mutant/
• http://solnic.eu/2013/01/23/mutation-testing-with-mutant.html

Projects using Mutant

The following projects adopted mutant, and aim for 100% mutation coverage:

• axiom
• axiom-types
• rom-mapper
• rom-session
• event_bus
• virtus
• quacky
• substation
• large_binomials
• promise.rb
• full_name
• various small/minor stuff under https://github.com/mbj

Feel free to ping me to add your project to the list!

Installation

Install the gem mutant via your preferred method.

gem install mutant

If you plan to use the RSpec integration you'll have to install mutant-rspec also. Please add an explicit dependency to rspec-core for the RSpec version you want to use.

gem install mutant-rspec

The minitest integration is still in the works.

The Crash / Stuck Problem (MRI)

Mutations generated by mutant can cause MRI to enter VM states its not prepared for. All MRI versions above 1.9 are affected by this depending on your compiler flags, compiler version, and OS scheduling behavior.

This can have the following unintended effects:

• MRI crashes with a segfault. Mutant kills each mutation in a dedicated fork to isolate the mutations side effects when this fork terminates abnormally (segfault) mutant counts the mutation as killed.

• MRI crashes with a segfault and gets stuck when handling the segfault. Depending on the number of active kill jobs mutant might appear to continue normally until all workers are stuck into this state when it begins to hang. Currently mutant must assume that your test suite simply not terminated yet as from the outside (parent process) the difference between a long running test and a stuck MRI is not observable. Its planned to implement a timeout enforced from the parent process, but ideally MRI simply gets fixed.

References:

• Mutant bug: https://github.com/mbj/mutant/issues/265
• Upstream bug: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/10460

Examples

cd virtus
# Run mutant on virtus namespace
mutant --include lib --require virtus --use rspec Virtus*
# Run mutant on specific virtus class
mutant --include lib --require virtus --use rspec Virtus::Attribute
# Run mutant on specific virtus class method
mutant --include lib --require virtus --use rspec Virtus::Attribute.build
# Run mutant on specific virtus instance method
mutant --include lib --require virtus --use rspec Virtus::Attribute#type

Subjects

Mutant currently mutates code in instance and singleton methods. It is planned to support mutation of constant definitions and domain specific languages, DSL probably as plugins.

Test-Selection

Mutation testing is slow. The key to making it fast is selecting the correct set of tests to run. Mutant currently supports the following built-in strategy for selecting tests/specs:

Mutant uses the "longest rspec example group descriptions prefix match" to select the tests to run.

Example for a subject like Foo::Bar#baz it will run all example groups with description prefixes in Foo::Bar#baz, Foo::Bar and Foo. The order is important, so if mutant finds example groups in the current prefix level, these example groups must kill the mutation.

Rails

Assuming you are using rspec, you can mutation test Rails models by adding the following lines to your Gemfile:

group :test do
  gem 'mutant'
  gem 'mutant-rspec'
end  

Next, run bundle and comment out require 'rspec/autorun' from your spec_helper.rb file. Having done so you should be able to use commands like the following:

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec mutant -r ./config/environment --use rspec User

Support

I'm very happy to receive/answer feedback/questions and criticism.

Your options:

• GitHub Issues
• Ping me on twitter

There is also the [#mutant] channel on freenode. As my OSS time budged is very limited I cannot join it often. Please prefer to use GitHub issues with a 'Question: ' prefix in title.

Credits

• Markus Schirp (mbj)
• A gist from dkubb showing ideas.
• Older abandoned mutant. For motivating me doing this one.
• heckle. For getting me into mutation testing.

Contributing

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with Rakefile or version (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

License

See LICENSE file.