[plt-dev] unit testing in TS

From: Carl Eastlund (cce at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Tue May 4 17:50:20 EDT 2010

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Noel Welsh <noelwelsh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> - Random testing and property based testing are the two areas I'd like
> to include support for. [Property based testing is a kinda meaningless
> phrase but a combinator library ala contracts might evolve out of
> this. Also randomtest.plt is a very nice starting place.]

Hmm... do you mean cce/fasttest.plt, or did you have some other random
testing framework in mind?  In any event, if you're looking for good
sources for designs for automated testing tools, I would look at
fasttest.plt for customizable distributions, PLT Redex for automated
grammar-based distributions, and of course all the literature and
implementations surrounding QuickCheck and SmallCheck.  And there's
the DeinProgramm QuickCheck collection, although I don't know how it
relates to the other approaches.

In any event, I think relying purely on random testing is not as good
as allowing both randomized and bounded-exhaustive testing.  There was
a presentation at IFL 2009 entitled "Unifying QuickCheck and
SmallCheck" by Jacques Carette and Gordon J. Uszkay; I don't know if
it has been published yet, but it was an interesting combination of
both approaches.

--Carl


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