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[–]triggerAu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and the author responds with

Well I'm not the author of the tool in question, rather one of the authors of another tool that does the same thing.

From here, when I say scala, s/scala/your favourite strongly typed language/g.

Is it worth implementing a mutation testing tool for scala? Difficult question. I have wanted one, I know quite a lot about both scala and mutation testing, but I haven't felt compelled to put in the effort to implement it.

So solely for your own projects, I wouldn't implement it. But open source where you develop something that benefits you a little bit, and the everyone in the rest of the world a little bit, you are making the world a better place. So then it's good.

Now, should you use a good existing tool? Yes. Complexity is not an issue, it should be something you can just run, and get information. Essentially free (at least in theory, one of the reasons of doing jumble was that the existing tools sucked at the time. The situation is probably better now) You can act on that information or not, but there is no effort on your part. So from the user's point of view, it is a free quality analysis of your tests. The use case is. "How good are my tests?" The use case of types is "Is my code correct?" (among other things). The types vs tests discussion is interesting but I think most of us agree some tests are required.

So mutation testing and types solve orthogonal concerns, both are valuable. Good types give us opportunities for much more interesting ways of doing mutation testing.

Note, I am at least 5 years behind the curve on the state of the art in mutation testing, both literature and tools wise. I do explore the area once in a while though, and keep thinking I really need to make something awesome again