Links for TPBT (Targeted Property-Based Testing)

[Scott Lystig Fritchie]

Howdy, everyone, thanks for the meetup organizing last night.  The thing that I'd mentioned for using property-based testing to expand code coverage wasn't quite right.  The links that I can easily find actually discuss another target of testing, but the technique is the same.  I just can't recall offhand where "your utility function is # lines of code coverage" came from, sorry!  I'll post a follow-up if I can find it.

Kostis Sagonas had a conference presentation a few months ago that discusses TPBT, targeted property-based testing.  When testing radio networks with simulated mesh topologies, using a random generator was ... too random.  "Interesting graphs" were almost never generated.  Kostis's research group created a way to automagically drive random data generators to explore more interesting graphs.  They defined a utility function: maximum distance between two nodes in the radio mesh graph.  Then they defined the data generator to maximize that distance ... and the new generator reliably generates high-max-distance graphs.

See minutes 15-32 of https://youtu.be/4-vJeCmkCZE?t=908..  PDF versions of the talk's slides are at https://codesync.global/uploads/media/default/0001/01/fd33426166979d663b0f6040a46cad6e2fe149cc.pdf.  I found a link to one of the two papers Kostis mentioned: http://proper.softlab.ntua.gr/papers/issta2017.pdf

-Scott