Property-Based Testing: a New Approach to Testing for Assurance
- G. Fink and M. Bishop, “Property-Based Testing: a New Approach to
Testing for Assurance,” ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 22(4)
pp. 74–80 (July 1997).
PDF (free, goes to the ACM Digital Library)
The goal of software testing analysis is to validate that an implementation satisfies its specifications. Many errors in software are caused by generalizable flaws in the source code. Property-based testing assures that a given program is free of specified generic flaws. Property-based testing uses property specifications and a data-flow analysis of the program to guide evaluation of test executions for correctness and completeness.