Experiences with QuickCheck: Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane

Hughes, John

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-30936-1_9

Cited by 25 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…While this way of expressing optionality can look a bit cumbersome compared to, for example, simply flagging an output as optional via a dedicated construct, it is far more expressive since the set we can give there is rather arbitrary. For example, we could allow the programs, for whatever reason, to output exactly any multiple of the result of some value computation 4 .…”

Section: Describing Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

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Describing Console I/O Behavior for Testing Student Submissions in Haskell

Westphal¹,

Voigtländer²

2020

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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We present a small, formal language for specifying the behavior of simple console I/O programs. The design is driven by the concrete application case of testing interactive Haskell programs written by students. Specifications are structurally similar to lexical analysis regular expressions, but are augmented with features like global variables that track state and history of program runs, enabling expression of an interesting range of dynamic behavior. We give a semantics for our specification language based on acceptance of execution traces. From this semantics we derive a definition of the set of all traces valid for a given specification. Sampling that set enables us to mechanically check program behavior against specifications in a probabilistic fashion. Beyond testing, other possible uses of the specification language in an education context include related activities like providing more helpful feedback, generating sample solutions, and even generating random exercise tasks.

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Section: Describing Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another testing approach that deals with stateful computations is Quviq QuickCheck [3,4] for Erlang 7 . Instead of testing specific programs, like we do, they test stateful APIs.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Describing Console I/O Behavior for Testing Student Submissions in Haskell

Westphal¹,

Voigtländer²

2020

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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“…They must make sure that their unit tests are thorough and pass. In addition, students must use random testing to further validate their machines following current trends to generate tests instead of (just) writing tests [8]. Random testing is a rather important step as it gives students confidence in their design.…”

Section: Designing Deterministic Finite-state Automatamentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual Designing and Debugging of Deterministic Finite-State Machines in FSM

Morazán

Schappel

Mahashabde

2020

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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This article presents a visualization tool for designing and debugging deterministic finite-state machines in FSM-a domain specific language for the automata theory classroom. Like other automata visualization tools, users can edit machines and observe their execution, given some input. Unlike other automata visualization tools, the user is not burdened nor distracted with rendering a machine as a graph. Furthermore, emphasis is placed on the design of machines and this article presents a novel design recipe for deterministic finite-state machines. In support of the design process, the visualization tool allows for each state to be associated with an invariant predicate. During machine execution, the visualization tool indicates if the proposed invariant holds or does not hold after each transition. In this manner, students can validate and debug their machines before attempting to prove partial correctness or submitting for grading. In addition, any machine edited with the visualization tool can be rendered as executable code. The interface of the visualization tool along with extended examples of its use are presented.

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“…Since then, the approach has been ported to numerous other programming languages, both statically and dynamically typed. The approach has also been extended beyond functional programming to test imperative (stateful) code [] and has had a number of successes, eg, using the commercial Erlang QuickCheck port to test and find numerous issues in automotive software []. For the remainder of this paper, we use the qcheck implementation of QuickCheck in OCaml.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

QuickChecking static analysis properties

Midtgaard

Möller

2017

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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Abstract-A static analysis can check programs for potential errors. A natural question that arises is therefore: who checks the checker? Researchers have given this question varying attention, ranging from basic testing techniques, informal monotonicity arguments, thorough pen-and-paper soundness proofs, to verified fixed point checking. In this paper we demonstrate how quickchecking can be useful for testing a range of static analysis properties with limited effort. We show how to check a range of algebraic lattice properties, to help ensure that an implementation follows the formal specification of a lattice. Moreover, we offer a number of generic, type-safe combinators to check transfer functions and operators on lattices, to help ensure that these are, e.g., monotone, strict, or invariant. We substantiate our claims by quickchecking a type analysis for the Lua programming language.

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Experiences with QuickCheck: Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane

Cited by 25 publications

References 12 publications

Describing Console I/O Behavior for Testing Student Submissions in Haskell

Describing Console I/O Behavior for Testing Student Submissions in Haskell

Visual Designing and Debugging of Deterministic Finite-State Machines in FSM

QuickChecking static analysis properties

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