Section: New Results

Property-based Testing

Participants : Nauval Atmaja, Horatiu Cirstea, Pierre-Etienne Moreau.

Quality is crucial for software systems and several aspects should be taken into account. Formal verification techniques like model checking and automated theorem proving can be used to guarantee the correctness of finite or infinite systems. While these approaches provide a high level of confidence they are sometimes difficult and expensive to apply. Software testing is another approach and although it cannot guarantee correctness it can be very efficient in finding errors.

We have proposed a property based testing framework for the Tom language inspired from the ones proposed in the context of functional programming. The previously developed tool has been improved by integrating it in the Junit framework. The tests are thus highly automatized and the library can be smoothly integrated in classical IDEs. The relatively simple shrinking method which searches a smaller counter-example starting from an initial relatively complex one has been also improved. The library is available at http://gforge.inria.fr/projects/tom .