Manuscript received December 20, 2022; revised January 28, 2023; accepted February 12, 2023.
Abstract—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.
Index Terms—Mutation testing, mutant, gamified education
The authors are with the Department of Information Engineering and
Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taiwan.
*Correspondence: nlhsueh@fcu.edu.tw (N.L.H.)
Cite: Nien-Lin Hsueh*, Zeng Hung Xuan, and Bilegjargal Daramsenge, "Design and Implementation of Gamified Learning System for Mutation Testing," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 1150-1155, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).