Additional feature? State-machine-based property testing

[ccol002]

For a number of years, I have been on the lookout for a Java QuickCheck tool supporting state-machine-based properties.

For example http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/ and http://proper.softlab.ntua.gr/Tutorials/PropEr_testing_of_finite_state_machines.html, and http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~marku/mbt/modeljunit/ offer the possibility of specifying properties in terms of finite state machines. This is very convenient when the property being tested has elements of control-flow, e.g.: every time a newly registered user performs a call to "withdraw" before a call to "deposit" is marked as suspicious.

The idea is to have pre and post conditions on each machine transition such that the test is a traversal of the state machine which satisfies the preconditions, checking the satisfaction of the postconditions as the test progresses.

Are there any plans to support such functionality please?

[hcoles]

There is in fact some support for something similar already built in, although it is completely undocumented as it is somewhat experimental.

It's loosely based on scalacheck's stateful testing - so it is not tied to state machines, but it does let you compare the behaviour of your system to a model which could be a state machine.

The nearest thing to documentation is the example test.

https://github.com/ncredinburgh/QuickTheories/blob/master/core/src/test/java/com/example/StatefulTest.java

[ccol002]

That's great to know! Hope there will be more of this in the future :)