Completely convinced of Spec, I am diving into property-based testing with test.check. However, I encounter some difficulties for which I would like to get the community's input.
The central part of the software I am developing, consists of a tree of different kinds of nodes that can refer to — and interact with — each other. There are many business rules that specify how those nodes can interact — e.g., a node of type A can refer to other nodes of types B and C (but not D); or a node can have max. 3 child nodes of type E but more than 3 child nodes of type F. It is trivial to have Spec generate completely random nodes to test functions that can ignore the business rules. However, other functions do depend on the business rules, and for those it is necessary to somewhat "guide" the generators towards random-but-compliant output. And here I'm stumbling: due to the business rules' complexity, this is not a matter of simply inserting a few such-that generators, so that I have already spent many days on writing a business rule compliant generator. Part of this is due to the multitude and complexity of the business rules, part due to the difficulty of writing generators (which operate at a higher level of abstraction, and for which only a subset of the normal Clojure constructs can be used). How do others cope with this issue? I have the feeling that I am pushing the generators far beyond what they were designed to do, but at the same I have to acknowledge that the time required to write traditional tests for functions dealing with the business rules is also substantial — so maybe the time required to write those generators is not abnormal. Any suggestions are welcomed! I did not find any in-depth observations of other developers about property-based testing on the Net. Maarten -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
