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13 - Luck: A Probabilistic Language for Testing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2020

Gilles Barthe
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy
Joost-Pieter Katoen
Affiliation:
RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Alexandra Silva
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

Property-based random testing á la QuickCheck requires building efficient generators for well-distributed random data satisfying complex logical predicates, but writing these generators can be difficult and error prone. This chapter introduces a probabilistic domain-specific language in which generators are conveniently expressed by decorating predicates with lightweight annotations to control both the distribution of generated values and the amount of constraint solving that happens before each variable is instantiated. This language, called Luck, makes generators easier to write, read and maintain. We give Luck a probabilistic formal semantics and prove several fundamental properties, including the soundness and completeness of random generation with respect to a standard predicate semantics. We evaluate Luck on common examples from the property-based testing literature and on two significant case studies, showing that it can be used in complex domains with comparable bug-finding effectiveness and a significant reduction in testing code size compared to handwritten generators.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

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