Infection vs Mutant

Infection is a PHP mutation-testing library that shows which changes a test suite fails to detect. It creates mutants using predefined operators, runs tests against changed code, and records killed and escaped mutants, errors, and timeouts. Its Mutation Score Indicator measures the share of generated mutations detected by tests; it also reports Mutation Code Coverage and Covered Code Mutation Score Indicator. Infection supports PHPUnit, PhpSpec, Codeception, and Testo, and runs from the command line at a project root. Teams can run mutated tests in parallel, focus analysis on touched lines or files, and set minimum mutation-score thresholds that fail a build. The homepage describes more than 100 mutators grouped into profiles and allows custom mutators. Optional PHPStan and Mago integrations can help catch escaped mutants involving type violations, dead code, and unreachable paths. Installation options include PHAR, Phive, Composer, Git, and Homebrew. A browser playground supports trying PHP code and tests without installing the tools. Infection is free under the BSD-3-Clause license and requires PHP 8.3 or newer plus Xdebug, phpdbg, or pcov.

Mutant is Ruby mutation-testing software that changes code in controlled ways to check whether tests catch the changes. It alters arithmetic, logical and bitwise operators, removes statements, and changes return values. It works with RSpec, Minitest and Test::Unit, and supports incremental runs for CI. Supported Ruby versions are 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 4.0 for runtime, syntax and mutations. Rails support is verified for versions 7.2, 8.0 and 8.1, with parallel-worker database isolation for PostgreSQL and SQLite. Mutant runs on developers’ machines or in CI, and includes parallel execution and reports of surviving mutants. It cannot generate mutations for methods defined inside closures, including methods created with module_eval, class_eval, define_method or define_singleton_method. The open-source plan is free for public repositories with the full feature set. Commercial monthly pricing is $30 a month per developer; yearly pricing is $250 a year per developer. CI use requires no additional subscriptions.