The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Seven students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer:

On the list this year are:

• LiveDocs - mentor Michael Wallner, student Hannes Magnusson
• The PHP Interpreter - mentor Derick Rethans, student David Wang
• XDebug - mentor Derick Rethans, student Adam Harvey
• Doctrine - mentor Lukas Smith, student Konsta Vesterinen
• PHPUnit - mentor Sebastian Bergmann, student Mike Lewis
• MDB2_Schema - mentor Lukas Smith, student Igor Feghali
• Jaws - mentor David Coallier, student Nicolas Bérard-Nault

Sebastian quotes a definition of "mutation testing" as:

Mutation Testing, or Automated Error Seeding, is an approach where the testing tool makes some change to the tested code, runs the tests, and if the tests pass displays a message saying what it changed.

The key difference is that it makes it easier to run a series of tests rather than just one at a time, aiding in more complex testing abilities. Check out this page on the PHPUnit site for more information.