MutaBot: A Mutation Testing Approach for Chatbots
This addresses a specific problem for chatbot developers by providing a mutation testing tool tailored to conversational systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing mutation testing concepts for a new domain.
The authors tackled the lack of mutation testing tools for conversational chatbots by developing MutaBot, which revealed weaknesses in test suites for three Dialogflow chatbots using generated test cases.
Mutation testing is a technique aimed at assessing the effectiveness of test suites by seeding artificial faults into programs. Although available for many platforms and languages, no mutation testing tool is currently available for conversational chatbots, which represent an increasingly popular solution to design systems that can interact with users through a natural language interface. Note that since conversations must be explicitly engineered by the developers of conversational chatbots, these systems are exposed to specific types of faults not supported by existing mutation testing tools. In this paper, we present MutaBot, a mutation testing tool for conversational chatbots. MutaBot addresses mutations at multiple levels, including conversational flows, intents, and contexts. We designed the tool to potentially target multiple platforms, while we implemented initial support for Google Dialogflow chatbots. We assessed the tool with three Dialogflow chatbots and test cases generated with Botium, revealing weaknesses in the test suites.