• kevincox@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Mutation testing is quite cool. Basically it analyzes you code and makes changes that should break something. For example if you have if (foo) { ... } it will remove the branch or make the branch run every time. It then runs your tests and sees if anything fails. If the tests don’t fail then either you should add another test, or that code was truly dead and should be removed.

    Of course this has lots of “false positives”. For example you may be checking if an allocation succeeded and don’t need to test if every possible allocation in your code fails, you trust that you can write if (!mem) abort() correctly.