Thomas Arts
Testing Web Services with QuickCheck
Thanks to frameworks like Phoenix, web services can be developed quickly. The result is scalable, fast and easy to adapt. A perfect platform to create really complex web services. When software gets more complex, it gets harder to test. There are many different parameters one can supply, posted JSON data types can have different dependencies and the order in which things happen may play a role. Thus, even if Phoenix helps a lot in getting a correct and complex web service produced, there still are possibilities for mistakes. These mistakes have to be found and testing is a way to do so. QuickCheck helps to automatically generate test cases for such web services.
Thomas Arts, co-founder and CTO of Quviq, has worked at Ericsson's computer Science Lab in the nineties. Together with Joe Armstrong, Simon Marlow and Phil Wadler, he tried to build a type system for Erlang. That being of little practical use, he later worked on verification tools for Erlang. After a short return to academia as professor at Chalmers, he is now fully devoted to amzing testing tools.
Quviq is the company that produced QuickCheck, a tool that automatically generates tests. The tool is written in Erlang, but can be used to test systems written in a variety of languages. Among other successes, it is heavily used within the telecom and automotive industry, for example for testing 5G base stations and AUTOSAR standard software.
Twitter: @quviq