Descartes: A Mutation Engine for PIT

I mutate therefore I am

This document briefly explains what if Descartes and the minimum steps to use it or start using its repository. For a full documentation on how to use Descartes in other scenarios and how to configure it go to the project's website.

What is Descartes?

Descartes evaluates the capability of your test suite to detect bugs using extreme mutation testing. It is able to find the worst tested methods in a project.

Descartes is developed as a mutation engine plugin for PIT which implements extreme mutation operators as proposed in the paper Will my tests tell me if I break this code?. It also works alongside other PIT extensions to provide more meaningful and actionable results improve results.

Quick start with Maven

To use Descartes in a Maven project, add the following plugin configuration to your pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.pitest</groupId>
  <artifactId>pitest-maven</artifactId>
  <version>1.20.2</version>
  <configuration>
    <mutationEngine>descartes</mutationEngine>
  </configuration>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>eu.stamp-project</groupId>
      <artifactId>descartes</artifactId>
      <version>1.3.34</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</plugin>

Then, execute the regular mutation coverage goal in the root folder of the project under test:

cd my-project-under-test
mvn clean package org.pitest:pitest-maven:mutationCoverage

All options from PIT can be used. For more details check the PIT documentation.

If you use a multi-module project take a look at PitMP.

Quick start with the repository

In a terminal, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/STAMP-project/pitest-descartes.git

switch to the cloned folder:

cd  pitest-descartes

install Descartes using the regular Apache Maven commands:

mvn install

Referencing Descartes

If you use Descartes on your research projects you may cite is as:

@inproceedings{vera_descartes_2018,
  author    = {Vera-Pérez, Oscar L. and Monperrus, Martin and Baudry, Benoit},
  url       = {https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3238147.3240474},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE ’18)},
  date      = {2018},
  month     = {09},
  doi       = {10.1145/3238147.3240474},
  pages     = {908--911},
  title     = {Descartes: A {PITest} Engine to Detect Pseudo-Tested Methods},
  urldate   = {2019-08-06},
  doi       = {10.1145/3238147.3240474},
  arxiv     = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03045},
  hal       = {https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01870976v1}
}

License

Descartes is published under LGPL-3.0.

Contributing

Issues, pull requests and other contributions are welcome. Check our GitHub repository

Funding

Until December 2019 Descartes was partially funded by the STAMP research project (European Commission - H2020).