Making Property-Based Testing Easier to Read for Humans

keywords: Test artifacts, test models, stakeholders, semi-natural language, property-based testing, quickcheck
Software stakeholders who do not have a technical profile (i.e. users, clients) but do want to take part in the development and/or quality assurance process of software, have an unmet need for communication on what is being tested during the development life-cycle. The transformation of test properties and models into semi-natural language representations is one way of responding to such need. Our research has demonstrated that these transformations are challenging but feasible, and they have been implemented into a prototype tool called textttreadSpec. The textttreadSpec tool transforms universally-quantified test properties and stateful test models -- the two kinds of test artifacts used in property-based testing -- into plain text interpretations. The tool has been successfully evaluated on the PBT artifacts produced and used within the FP7 PROWESS project by industrial partners.
reference: Vol. 35, 2016, No. 4, pp. 890–913