PghQA - Property Based Testing

‎Visiting Lecturer at University of Pittsburgh

In the old days, one would have to manually write and execute all of one's tests . Modern testing often involves manually writing tests, but the computer executes them (e.g. unit testing and automated web testing). What if we could hop up yet another layer of automation and have the computer both write and execute our tests for us? With property-based testing, that dream is a reality. By defining the properties of input and output, we can have the computer itself generate and execute hundreds - or thousands, or millions - of tests, and perhaps find edge cases which would never have been found with traditional testing.

In this talk, Bill Laboon, visiting lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, will go over the benefits and drawbacks of property-based testing, how it can be used to quickly find failure modes of functions and systems, and how to incorporate it into your projects and testing strategy. Although implementations will be shown, this is a talk on the concept and underpinnings of property-based testing and so should be relevant no matter which language(s) your system uses.