SkillsCast

Quickly Checking your Code for Fun & Profit

3rd May 2016 in Perth

There are 28 other SkillsCasts available from YOW! West 2016

A SkillsCast for this session is not available.

Laziness is one of Larry Wall’s “three great virtues of a programmer”, but most people probably don’t consider it a virtue when writing tests! Wouldn’t it be great though, if we could write a program that generates our tests for us? As it turns out, we can and should do this using property-based testing.

I’ll go through some example testing scenarios in a few popular programming languages, aiming to demonstrate:

What property-based testing is and why EVERYONE should be using it (not just people coding in functional languages!)
How generators can quickly & easily come up with more thorough test inputs than a programmer typing in magic numbers
How to (and how not to) define properties to specify program behaviour
The genius of shrinkers and why they can save you hours of tedious debugging and questioning your life choices

Attendees will gain a solid & practical understanding of how they can apply property-based testing to their own code, in fashion that is both enjoyable and lucrative.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

About the Speaker