View Source ExUnitProperties (StreamData v1.1.0)

Provides macros for property-based testing.

This module provides a few macros that can be used for property-based testing. The core is check/3, which allows executing arbitrary tests on many pieces of generated data. Another one is property/3, which is meant as a utility to replace the ExUnit.Case.test/3 macro when writing properties. The last one is gen/3, which can be used as syntactic sugar to build generators (see StreamData for other ways of building generators and for core generators).

Overview of property-based testing

One of the most common ways of writing tests (in Elixir and many other languages) is to write tests by hand. For example, say that we want to write a starts_with?/2 function that takes two binaries and returns true if the first starts with the second and false otherwise. We would likely test such function with something like this:

test "starts_with?/2" do
  assert starts_with?("foo", "f")
  refute starts_with?("foo", "b")
  assert starts_with?("foo", "")
  assert starts_with?("", "")
  refute starts_with?("", "something")
end

This test highlights the method used to write such kind of tests: they're written by hand. The process usually consists of testing an expected output on a set of expected inputs. This works especially well for edge cases, but the robustness of this test could be improved. This is what property-based testing aims to solve. Property testing is based on two ideas:

  • specify a set of properties that a piece of code should satisfy
  • test those properties on a very large number of randomly generated data

The point of specifying properties instead of testing manual scenarios is that properties should hold for all the data that the piece of code should be able to deal with, and in turn, this plays well with generating data at random. Writing properties has the added benefit of forcing the programmer to think about their code differently: they have to think about which are invariant properties that their code satisfies.

To go back to the starts_with?/2 example above, let's come up with a property that this function should hold. Since we know that the Kernel.<>/2 operator concatenates two binaries, we can say that a property of starts_with?/2 is that the concatenation of binaries a and b always starts with a. This is easy to model as a property using the check/3 macro from this module and generators taken from the StreamData module:

test "starts_with?/2" do
  check all a <- StreamData.binary(),
            b <- StreamData.binary() do
    assert starts_with?(a <> b, a)
  end
end

When run, this piece of code will generate a random binary and assign it to a, do the same for b, and then run the assertion. This step will be repeated for a large number of times (100 by default, but it's configurable), hence generating many combinations of random a and b. If the body passes for all the generated data, then we consider the property to hold. If a combination of randomly generated terms fails the body of the property, then ExUnitProperties tries to find the smallest set of random generated terms that still fails the property and reports that; this step is called shrinking.

Shrinking

Say that our starts_with?/2 function blindly returns false when the second argument is the empty binary (such as starts_with?("foo", "")). It's likely that in 100 runs an empty binary will be generated and bound to b. When that happens, the body of the property fails but a is a randomly generated binary and this might be inconvenient: for example, a could be <<0, 74, 192, 99, 24, 26>>. In this case, the check/3 macro tries to shrink a to the smallest term that still fails the property (b is not shrunk because "" is the smallest binary possible). Doing so will lead to a = "" and b = "" which is the "minimal" failing case for our function.

The example above is a contrived example but shrinking is a very powerful tool that aims at taking the noise out of the failing data.

For detailed information on shrinking, see also the "Shrinking" section in the documentation for StreamData.

Building structs

We can use the built-in generators to generate other kinds of structs. For example, imagine we wanted to test the following function.

def noon?(~T[12:00:00]), do: true
def noon?(_), do: false

We could generate %Time{} structs as follows:

defp non_noon_generator do
  gen all time <- valid_time_generator(), time != ~T[12:00:00] do
    time
  end
end

defp valid_time_generator do
  gen all hour <- StreamData.integer(0..23),
          minute <- StreamData.integer(0..59),
          second <- StreamData.integer(0..59) do
    Time.new!(hour, minute, second)
  end
end

and use them in properties:

describe "noon?/1" do
  test "returns true for noon" do
    assert noon?(~T[12:00:00]) == true
  end

  property "returns false for other times" do
    check all time <- non_noon_generator() do
      assert noon?(time) == false
    end
  end
end

Resources on property-based testing

There are many resources available online on property-based testing. An interesting read is the original paper that introduced QuickCheck, "QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs", a property-testing tool for the Haskell programming language. Another very useful resource especially geared towards Erlang and the BEAM is propertesting.com, a website created by Fred Hebert: it's a great explanation of property-based testing that includes many examples. Fred's website uses an Erlang property-based testing tool called PropEr but many of the things he talks about apply to ExUnitProperties as well.

Summary

Functions

Sets up an ExUnit.Case module for property-based testing.

Runs tests for a property.

Syntactic sugar to create generators.

Picks a random element generated by the StreamData generator data.

Defines a not-implemented property test with a string.

Defines a property and imports property-testing facilities in the body.

Functions

Link to this macro

__using__(opts)

View Source (macro)

Sets up an ExUnit.Case module for property-based testing.

Link to this macro

check(clauses_and_body)

View Source (macro)

Runs tests for a property.

This macro provides ad hoc syntax to write properties. Let's see a quick example to get a feel of how it works:

check all int1 <- integer(),
          int2 <- integer(),
          int1 > 0 and int2 > 0,
          sum = int1 + int2 do
  assert sum > int1
  assert sum > int2
end

Everything between check all and do is referred to as clauses. Clauses are used to specify the values to generate in order to test the properties. The actual tests that the properties hold live in the do block.

Clauses work exactly like they work in the gen/1 macro.

The body passed in the do block is where you test that the property holds for the generated values. The body is just like the body of a test: use ExUnit.Assertions.assert/2 (and friends) to assert whatever you want.

Options

  • :initial_size - (non-negative integer) the initial generation size used to start generating values. The generation size is then incremented by 1 on each iteration. See the "Generation size" section of the StreamData documentation for more information on generation size. Defaults to 1.

  • :max_runs - (non-negative integer) the total number of generations to run. Defaults to 100.

  • :max_run_time - (non-negative integer) the total number of time (in milliseconds) to run a given check for. This is not used by default, so unless a value is given then the length of the test will be determined by :max_runs. If both :max_runs and :max_run_time are given, then the check will finish at whichever comes first, :max_runs or :max_run_time.

  • :max_shrinking_steps - (non-negative integer) the maximum numbers of shrinking steps to perform in case a failing case is found. Defaults to 100.

  • :max_generation_size - (non-negative integer) the maximum generation size to reach. Note that the size is increased by one on each run. By default, the generation size is unbounded.

  • :initial_seed - (integer) the initial seed used to drive the random generation. When check all is run with the same initial seed more than once, then every time the terms generated by the generators will be the same as all other runs. This is useful when you want to deterministically reproduce a result. However, it's usually better to leave :initial_seed to its default value, which is taken from ExUnit's seed: this way, the random generation will follow options like --seed used in ExUnit to deterministically reproduce tests.

It is also possible to set the values for :initial_size, :max_runs, :max_run_time, and :max_shrinking_steps through your project's config files. This is especially helpful in combination with :max_runs when you want to run more iterations on your continuous integration platform, but keep your local tests fast:

# config/test.exs
import Config

config :stream_data,
  max_runs: if System.get_env("CI"), do: 1_000, else: 50

Examples

Check that all values generated by the StreamData.integer/0 generator are integers:

check all int <- integer() do
  assert is_integer(int)
end

Check that String.starts_with?/2 and String.ends_with?/2 always hold for concatenated strings:

check all start <- binary(),
          finish <- binary(),
          concat = start <> finish do
  assert String.starts_with?(concat, start)
  assert String.ends_with?(concat, finish)
end

Check that Kernel.in/2 returns true when checking if an element taken out of a list is in that same list (changing the number of runs):

check all list <- list_of(integer()),
          member <- member_of(list),
          max_runs: 50 do
  assert member in list
end

Using check all in doctests

check all can be used in doctests. Make sure that the module where you call doctest(MyModule) calls use ExUnitProperties. Then, you can call check all in your doctests:

@doc """
Tells if a term is an integer.

    iex> check all i <- integer() do
    ...>   assert int?(i)
    ...> end
    :ok

"""
def int?(i), do: is_integer(i)

check all always returns :ok, so you can use that as the return value of the whole expression.

Link to this macro

gen(clauses_and_body)

View Source (macro)

Syntactic sugar to create generators.

This macro provides ad-hoc syntax to write complex generators. Let's see a quick example to get a feel of how it works. Say we have a User struct:

defmodule User do
  defstruct [:name, :email]
end

We can create a generator of users like this:

email_generator = map({binary(), binary()}, fn {left, right} -> left <> "@" <> right end)

user_generator =
  gen all name <- binary(),
          email <- email_generator do
    %User{name: name, email: email}
  end

Everything between gen all and do is referred to as clauses. You can write clauses to specify the values to generate. You can then use those values in the do body. The newly-created generator will generate values that are the return value of the do body using the generated values in the clauses.

Clauses

As seen in the example above, clauses can be of the following types:

  • value generation - they have the form pattern <- generator where generator must be a generator. These clauses take a value out of generator on each run and match it against pattern. Variables bound in pattern can be then used throughout subsequent clauses and in the do body. If pattern doesn't match a generated value, it's treated like a filter (see the "filtering" clauses described below).

  • filtering and binding - they have the form expression. If a filtering clause returns a truthy value, then the set of generated values that appear before the filtering clause is considered valid and generation continues. If the filtering clause returns a falsey value, then the current value is considered invalid and a new value is generated. Note that filtering clauses should not filter out too many times; in case they do, a StreamData.FilterTooNarrowError error is raised (same as StreamData.filter/3). Filtering clauses can be used also to assign variables: for example, a = :foo is a valid clause.

The behaviour of the clauses above is similar to the behaviour of clauses in Kernel.SpecialForms.for/1.

Body

The return value of the body passed in the do block is what is ultimately generated by the generator return by this macro.

Shrinking

See the module documentation for more information on shrinking. Clauses affect shrinking in the following way:

@spec pick(StreamData.t(a)) :: a when a: term()

Picks a random element generated by the StreamData generator data.

This function uses the current ExUnit seed to generate a random term from data. The generation size (see Generation size) is chosen at random between in 1..100. If you want finer control over the generation size, you can use functions like StreamData.resize/2 to resize data or StreamData.scale/2 to scale the generation size.

Examples

ExUnitProperties.pick(StreamData.integer())
#=> -21
Link to this macro

property(message)

View Source (macro)

Defines a not-implemented property test with a string.

Provides a convenient macro that allows a property test to be defined with a string, but not yet implemented. The resulting property test will always fail and print a "Not implemented" error message. The resulting test case is also tagged with :not_implemented.

This behavior is similar to ExUnit.Case.test/1.

Examples

property "this will be a property test in the future"
Link to this macro

property(message, context \\ quote do _ end, contents)

View Source (macro)

Defines a property and imports property-testing facilities in the body.

This macro is similar to ExUnit.Case.test/3, except that it denotes a property. In the given body, all the functions exposed by StreamData are imported, as well as check/2.

When defining a test whose body only consists of one or more check/2 calls, it's advised to use property/3 so as to clearly denote and scope properties. Doing so will also improve reporting.

Examples

use ExUnitProperties

property "reversing a list doesn't change its length" do
  check all list <- list_of(integer()) do
    assert length(list) == length(:lists.reverse(list))
  end
end