Testing properties with QuickCheck

“Choose your own adventure”

Lightning talk, Brisbane Software Testers

Quick overview

• Test properties of your programs.
• Randomised test inputs.

Demo (basics)

Appeal to authority

Better than unit tests—Michael Nygard (2013)

Testing UI

• Choose your own adventure.
• randomised user actions.

Demo (arbitrary)

Testing Concurrent Systems

… or …

• Concurrent
• Testing
• Systems

:P

Concurrent systems (2)

• Google “Erlang QuviQ” to find reports and talks.
• Distributed Systems are Concurrency Systems that span multiple nodes.
  • i.e. these ideas apply to Distributed Systems.
  • i.e. web

References

• Original QuickCheck paper from 2000—Claessen and Hughes (PDF)
• QuickCheck homepage and manual
• Testing and quality assurance—Chapter 11 of Real World Haskell
• Introduction to QuickCheck on Haskell Wiki
• https://github.com/steshaw/quickcheck-examples

References (2)

Testing Concurrent Systems

• Erlang QuickCheck
• Testing Erlang Concurrency with QuickCheck (PDF)
• Finding Race Conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE (PDF)

References (3)

Testing Distributed Systems

• Testing Telecoms Software with Quviq QuickCheck (PDF)
• Modeling eventually consistent databases with QuickCheck (Video), Jon Meredith, Basho.

See Also

• SmallCheck for exhaustive checking of your properties (rather than QuickCheck style random samples)
• Comparison of QuickCheck and SmallCheck