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OOPSLA
2010
Springer

Random testing for higher-order, stateful programs

13 years 2 months ago
Random testing for higher-order, stateful programs
Testing is among the most effective tools available for finding bugs. Still, we know of no automatic technique for generating test cases that expose bugs involving a combination of mutable state and callbacks, even though objects and method overriding set up exactly that combination. For such cases, a test generator must create callbacks or subclasses that aggressively exercise side-effecting operations using combinations of generated objects. This paper presents a new algorithm for randomly testing programs that use state and callbacks. Our algorithm exploits a combination of contracts and environment bindings to guide the test-case generator toward interesting inputs. Our prototype implementation for Racket (formerly PLT Scheme)—which has a Java-like class system, but with firstclass classes as well as gbeta-like augmentable methods— uncovered dozens of bugs in a well-tested and widely used text-editor library. We describe our approach in a precise, formal notation, borrowing ...
Casey Klein, Matthew Flatt, Robert Bruce Findler
Added 29 Jan 2011
Updated 29 Jan 2011
Type Journal
Year 2010
Where OOPSLA
Authors Casey Klein, Matthew Flatt, Robert Bruce Findler
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