Gamified Model Mutation Testing: Improving Test Quality and Testing Skills through Competitive Play

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Abstract
Context: Modern software development increasingly relies on conceptual models as blueprints for system design, particularly in low-code/no-code and Model-Driven Engineering approaches. Ensuring the semantic quality of these models is non-trivial, and testing-based approaches can be used for this.Objectives: One particularly promising testing-based approach is model mutation testing, which applies code-based mutation testing principles to conceptual models. In this approach, models with minor syntactic differences from the original model are created and tested against the test suite. However, model mutation testing requires skills that students often lack. Gamification has been proposed as a solution to this problem, as it structures complexity through game mechanics. Therefore, we investigated whether gamified model mutation testing improves students' testing skills.Method: We developed ModelDefenders, a competitive web game for entity-relationship model testing based on model mutation testing, and conducted a pretest-treatment-posttest experiment with students (n=34) enrolled in varying university degrees.Results: The results show that students created higher quality test cases post-treatment. The tool received positive user ratings independent of personal characteristics.Conclusion: We conclude that the gamified approach used in our research is associated with higher model testing performance, providing empirical evidence for gamification effectiveness in software engineering education.

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