Evaluation and assessment of effects on exploring mutation testing in programming courses

Mutation analysis is a testing strategy that consists of using supporting tools to seed artificial faults in the original code of a software under test, generating faulty programs (“mutants”) that are supposed to produce incorrect outputs. Novice programmers suffer of a wide range of deficits due to defective training processes. We argue that the incorporation of experiences on mutation testing in programming courses adds valuable knowledge to the learning process. In this paper we evaluate the effects of using mutation testing to improve the learning process of students in programming courses. We present results of experiments and analysis involving undergraduate students. These experiments are the continuation of a previous work in which we raise empirical evidences that the adequate incorporation of mutation testing in programming courses contributes to form an effective environment that fosters learning. To do so, we provide a mutation testing tool to promote the practice of mutation testing by novice programmers. Through practical experiences and several analysis survey we measured the effects of using the mutation testing criterion to teach programming. In addition, we collected the opinion of senior students who already knew mutation testing concepts about their opinion on the usage of mutation concepts to teach novice programmers. Our findings reveal that the effective use of mutation analysis concepts contributes to the learning process, making students see the code as a product under development that is the result of a careful manual coding process which they need for measuring and predicting the effect of each command. The main contributions discussed in this paper are: (1) presenting results of an empirical analysis involving undergraduate students, thus giving us preliminary evidence on the effects of the novel practice; (2) exposing possible practices to explore mutation testing in programming classes, highlighting the limitations and strengths of such strategy; and (3) a mutation testing tool for educational purposes.