Writing an Ant task for Jumble mutation tester

Jumble is a pretty neat tool for doing mutation testing on your Java code, to see how effective your JUnit tests are at catching small changes to the test subjects. It works by mutating bytecode rather than source (a la Jester), and so is much faster to execute. However, I was sad to see that there is no accompanying Ant task or Maven plugin. Running Jumble in either of these tools could certainly be accomplished by simply cooking up a Java VM invocation with the appropriate command line arguments...but I think it'd be useful to have tasks/plugins that, among other things, fail the build if a class's Jumble score dips below a defined threshold. Many code coverage tools (e.g. Cobertura) have such provisions in their Ant/Maven tasks/plugins.

So, I'm undertaking to write an Ant task for Jumble. Initially it will invoke the tool via its CLI and scrape the output for scores, but ultimately I'd like to integrate the task more tightly with Jumble's API. Hopefully that API lends itself well to being hooked into.

Comments

[Marco Aurélio]

Hello. I just found Jumble, it looks like a good mutation testing tool. Up to now, I've used Jester (and Simple-Jester), but it's too slow for my purposes. Implementing an Ant (or Maven) task would be amazing! Have you implemented it already? If the source code is available, I'd like to help.

[pmead]

Did you write that Ant task and scrape the output? My company is considering doing the same and contributing back to the Jumble project.

[Pholser]

@pmead I did, but haven't done anything with it. So many side projects, so little time...If you've got your version ready to go, go for it -- it'd be a great addition to the Jumble tool. A Maven plugin would be even awesomer. 8^)