T12: Introduction to testing with QuickCheck

Abstract

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 180 minute 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.

John Hughes

John Hughes is co-founder and CEO of Quviq AB, and the originator of Quviq QuickCheck. From 2002-2005 he led a major research project in software verification, funded by the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation. This led to the development of Quviq QuickCheck in Erlang. Before John\'s involvement with Erlang, he was deeply involved with the design of Haskell from the start, and co-chaired the committee that defined the current language standard.