Mutation testing as a safety net for test code refactoring
Ali Parsai, Alessandro Murgia, Quinten David Soetens, Serge Demeyer · 2015
Refactoring is an activity that improves the internal structure of the code without altering its external behavior. When performed on the production code, the tests can be used to verify that the external behavior of the production code is preserved. However, when the refactoring is performed on test code, there is no safety net that assures that the external behavior of the test code is preserved.