Chris Struble – Meteorcomm LLC
Learning a new software testing technique and applying it successfully in your career is deeply satisfying. What if your organization is heavily invested in a different testing technique? How can you convince your colleagues to try your technique, and help them to adopt it successfully?
Many organizations use Example-based testing (EBT), where test cases are manually designed one example at a time, then executed automatically in a repeatable way. EBT techniques such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), and Acceptance Testing have been widely adopted. EBT falls short because it cannot be used to test examples that no one thought of.
EBT shortcomings had led to the development of techniques for the automated generation of test cases. In Generator-based Testing (GBT), software behavior is described to a tool that generates test cases in a non-deterministic way, which are then executed automatically. Three examples of GBT techniques are Model-based testing (MBT), Property-based testing (PBT), and Fuzzing. Each of these techniques has found high profile defects that escaped EBT testing. Even so, there has not been widespread adoption of these techniques.
This paper will present an approach to doing GBT that makes it more accessible, and easier to progress through states of adoption. The approach is based on more than 20 years of experience using MBT. The paper will also describe an MBT framework developed in Ruby using open source tools in the past year, and the results of introducing it in a workplace where EBT techniques were already widely adopted.
Chris Struble, 2020 Technical Presentation, Paper, Slides
