Rank removal candidates

trailofbits / necessist

A mutation-based tool for finding bugs in tests

https://crates.io/crates/necessist

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

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Open smoelius1 opened 4 months ago

smoelius1 commented 4 months ago

Recording an idea from @stansw...

Is there some way to rank removal candidates?

If there were, it could provide a way to limit false positives, e.g., by only running Necissist on the top n% of the the removal candidates.

smoelius1 commented 4 months ago

Follow-up ideas:

How do existing mutation testing tools rank mutants?
Could ML be applied here? There is an issue to output a checklist. If a user checks an item, it signals that the item was worth checking. Could this information serve as training data?

smoelius commented 3 months ago

Some relevant papers:

MuRanker: a mutant ranking tool: "ranks mutants according to their predicted difficulty and complexity in being detected"
MuRS: Mutant Ranking and Suppression using Identifier Templates: "[ranks] mutants based on historical developer feedback"
Prioritizing Mutants to Guide Mutation Testing: "[selects] mutants based on their predicted TCAP [test completeness advancement probability]"