Tomasz Kowal

Introduction to stateful property based testing

Property-based testing is a technique for writing tests that use a framework for creating test inputs and user-defined properties for validating outputs. Generating data allows for finding bugs that would be impossible to catch by regular unit tests: e.g. too big to encode by hand. This talk will explain why it is worth getting into PBT by introducing successful usages of PBT for testing AUTOSAR, LevelDB and Dropbox. All these examples use stateful testing, so the second half of the talk describes steps to create a stateful test for a simple key-value store.

Objectives

Introductory materials for PBT often focus on straightforward cases which are great for teaching but fail to show the true potential of PBT. The goal of this talk is a high-level overview that is both encouraging for beginners but also maps the road to mastering Property-Based Testing.

Audience

Developers who have heard about Property-Based Testing but are not convinced yet about its usefulness.