QuickCheck Evolution

QuickCheck, our random testing tool, has a long track record of nailing serious and hard-to-find bugs and boosting quality, in software like dets (part of mnesia), Riak, and the embedded software in cars. QuickCheck is usually used manually and interactively: the developer invokes QuickCheck, finds a bug, and fixes it--rinse and repeat. But how should QuickCheck be deployed in the longer term? How should it be used for regression testing, continuous integration, etc? Can we derive further power from the QuickCheck approach to help software evolve? In this talk I will present new ideas in this direction under development at Quviq.

Talk objectives:

To show some of the cool things possible with property-based testing in the longer term.

Target audience:

Anyone interested in test automation.

TUTORIAL: Introduction to Testing with QuickCheck

QuickCheck support property based development. Instead of writing test cases for your applications, you write a one-pager with a QuickCheck property from which hundreds of test cases are generated automatically.QuickCheck simplifies failing cases to a minimal example on a test failure (so that fault diagnosis is quick and easy). QuickCheck enables developers to dramatically improve test coverage, and find obscure errors at an earlier stage, lowering costs and improving quality as a result.

In this tutorial we will use examples to show how developers write QuickCheck specifications—which are actually Erlang programs using the QuickCheck API—and use them to test code written in Erlang or other programming languages. We will show how QuickCheck’s shrinking finds tiny examples that provoke errors, making the step from observing a bug to diagnosing it very short indeed, and we will show how property driven development can produce code that is solid from the word go.