A User Study for Mutation-based Testing Analysis

I recently read some material by Andreas Zeller in which he discusses the merits of using mutation testing as a method of verifying the quality of a test suite for a piece of software. These methods are meant to expose tests which perform an action, and assume that it was performed properly so long as an error is not thrown by the system under test - they do not verify that the action resulted in the desired program state. Code mutation (either on source or directly on the bytecode), when combined with accurate code coverage data, can identifiy these deficient tests by mutating the code they cover and observing tests that do not fail.

I believe that there is value in using this data, if it can be presented in the appropriate manner. If a developer has to spend an hour to generate the mutation report and cross-reference it with code coverage, then the investment likely outweighs the benefit. However, if I can arrive at my desk at 9am, and have in my inbox a build report, test report with coverage, and a mutation report for every branch, all of which are properly hyperlinked to each other and backed up on a central storage, then I would certainly use it. The problem here seems to be that this degree of automation and integration is hard to set up, and often times delicate when in place. It seems that some sort of standard platform for use by build engineers for integrating all of their reports, packaging operations, tests, etc, is called for. However, I have yet to see anything more sophisticated than Ant or Perl in widespread use by engineers. Maybe I just have an unrepresentative sample, though.