Mutation testing drives the creation and improvement of test cases by evaluating their ability to identify synthetic faults. Over the past decades, the technique has gained popularity in academic circles. In practice, however, little is known about its adoption and use. While there are some pilot studies applying mutation testing in industry, the overall usage of mutation testing among developers remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, this paper presents the results of a qualitative study among open-source developers on the use of mutation testing. Specifically, we report the results of a survey of 104 contributors to open-source projects using a variety of mutation testing tools. The findings of our study provide helpful insights into the use of mutation testing in practice, including its main benefits and limitations. Overall, we observe a high degree of satisfaction with mutation testing across different programming languages and mutation testing tools. Developers find the technique helpful for improving the quality of test suites, detecting bugs, and improving code maintainability. Popularity, usability, and configurability emerge as key factors for the adoption of mutation tools, whereas performance stands overwhelmingly as their main limitation. These results lay the groundwork for new research contributions and tools that meet the needs of developers and boost the widespread adoption of mutation testing.

中文翻译：

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突变测试实践：开源软件开发人员的见解

突变测试通过评估测试用例识别综合故障的能力来推动测试用例的创建和改进。在过去的几十年里，该技术在学术界得到了普及。然而在实践中，人们对它的采用和使用知之甚少。尽管有一些在工业中应用突变测试的试点研究，但开发人员中突变测试的总体使用情况在很大程度上仍未得到探索。为了填补这一空白，本文介绍了开源开发人员对突变测试的使用进行定性研究的结果。具体来说，我们报告了使用各种突变测试工具对开源项目的 104 名贡献者进行的调查结果。我们的研究结果为突变测试在实践中的使用提供了有用的见解，包括其主要优点和局限性。总体而言，我们观察到不同编程语言和突变测试工具对突变测试的满意度很高。开发人员发现该技术有助于提高测试套件的质量、检测错误和提高代码可维护性。流行性、可用性和可配置性成为采用变异工具的关键因素，而性能则是它们的主要限制。这些结果为满足开发人员需求并促进突变测试的广泛采用的新研究贡献和工具奠定了基础。