QuickCheck

One of the most interesting parts of generative testing (aka QuickCheck). Is state machine testing. The original purpose I built Fox was to explore state machine testing. In particular, the talk from John Hughes video was inspirational to exploring this further: In short, John makes a case: dynamically generating state machines to detect errors that is more effective and economical than traditional example based tests. There’s lots of work managing example based tests that can be better solved with generative testing. ...

It’s no secret that I’ve been interested in testing. Most of the work I’ve done are around example-based testing. While useful, it’s interesting to look at other communities for inspiration. I’m specifically fascinated in the functional programming community. Generative testing in particular. It was popularized in the early 2000s by a famous implementation in Haskell, QuickCheck. In short, generative testing is allows you specify properties your software should have. Then the testing library generates test cases. It’s an alternative path the functional community has taken when it comes to testing. This becomes evident since testing functional code becomes mostly boilerplate management: ...