Topic summary
Mutation analysis
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Mutation testing.
Introduction
Most of this article is about "program mutation", in which the program is modified. A more general definition of mutation analysis is using well-defined rules defined on syntactic structures to make systematic changes to software artifacts. Mutation analysis has been applied to other problems, but is usually applied to testing. So mutation testing is defined as using mutation analysis to design new software tests or to evaluate existing software tests. Thus, mutation analysis and testing can be applied to design models, specifications, databases, tests, XML, and other types of software artifacts, although program mutation is the most common.