Design and Implementation of Gamified Learning System for Mutation Testing

Mutation Testing is used to test case improvement mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of test cases by generating a large number of mutants. In the past, some approaches are proposed to improve the performance of generating the mutants. In recent years, many studies have begun to explore the software engineering education of mutation testing, trying to make students understand its concept through gamification. In this paper, we apply gamification theory and build a gamified learning system for mutation testing, named code immunity boost (CIB), taking the story of vaccine development as a sense of mission. We invited students to learn mutation testing through the relationship between leukocyte (test case), vaccine (mutant) and human body (program). Students can play the role of a vaccine and stimulate the testing of test cases by writing mutants to improve the quality of the program. We adopted the benchmark programs commonly used in mutation testing research, and developed a code vaccine incubator (CVI) tool to generate a large number of mutants as the experimental cornerstone of this study. Final experiments show that our tool can help mutation testing education, as the performance and quality of the experimental group is better than that of the control group. The response from the questionnaire also shows students like learning by our gamified tool. We therefore recommend to promote such software testing education approach by integrating our tool with popular online programming tools such as Online Judge system.