Surprise yourself with property-based testing – Martin Hellspong at Øredev Conference

Here’s how Martin describes his session:

Everybody writes unit tests these days (or do they?). An educated guess tells me that 99% of the tests in your code base are so-called "example-based" tests, where you assert that given some example inputs, the result is the one you expected. At best, you throw in some examples of known edge cases for good measure.

But in many cases, we can do better – as in finding additional bugs with the same or less effort – by using testing libraries that support Property Based Testing.

What you'll learn from this talk, is that PBT gives you the testing super-power to surprise yourself and your code, which rarely happens with example-based testing. Being unable to (inadvertently) give softball examples that are way too easy on your code, can help uncover many problems as well as odd edge cases nobody considered.

In this session, Martin gives you a few PBT recipes, in the hope that one or more may fit your situation and help you get started with this underutilized testing technique.

If this sounds interesting you can watch Surprise yourself with property-based testing on YouTube!