PIT: a practical mutation testing tool for Java (demo)

Mutation testing introduces artificial defects to measure the adequacy of testing. In case candidate tests can distinguish the behaviour of mutants from that of the original program, they are considered of good quality -- otherwise developers need to design new tests. While, this method has been shown to be effective, industry-scale code challenges its applicability due to the sheer number of mutants and test executions it requires. In this paper we present PIT, a practical mutation testing tool for Java, applicable on real-world codebases. PIT is fast since it operates on bytecode and optimises mutant executions. It is also robust and well integrated with development tools, as it can be invoked through a command line interface, Ant or Maven. PIT is also open source and hence, publicly available at http: //pitest. org/