The sad state of property-based testing libraries

Posted on Jul 2, 2024

Property-based testing is a rare example of academic research that has made it to the mainstream in less than 30 years. Under the slogan “don’t write tests, generate them” property-based testing has gained support from a diverse group of programming language communities. In fact, the Wikipedia page of the original property-basted testing Haskell library, QuickCheck, lists 57 reimplementations in other languages.

In this post I’d like to survey the most popular property-based testing implementations and compare them with what used to be the state-of-the-art fifteen years ago (2009). As the title already gives away, most of the libraries do not offer their users the most advanced property-based testing features. In order to best explain what’s missing and why I think we ended up in this situation, let me start by telling the brief history of property-based testing.

The history of property-based testing

In Gothenburg, Sweden’s second most populated city, there’s a university called Chalmers. At the computer science department of Chalmers there are several research groups, two of which are particularly relevant to our story – the Functional Programming group and Programming Logic group. I’ll let you guess what the former group’s main interest is. The latter group’s mostly concerned with a branch of functional programming where the type system is sufficiently expressive that it allows for formal specifications of programs, sometimes called dependently typed programming or type theory. Agda is an example of a Haskell-like dependently typed programming language, that also happens to be mainly developed by the Programming Logic group. Given the overlap of interest and proximity, researchers at the department are sometimes part of both groups or at least visit each others research seminars from time to time.

John Hughes is a long-time member of the Functional Programming group, who’s also well aware of the research on dependently typed programming going on in the Programming Logic group. One day in the late nineties, after having worked hard on finishing something important on time, John found himself having a week “off”. So, just for fun, he started experimenting with the idea of testing if a program respects a formal specification.

Typically in dependently typed programming you use the types to write the specification and then the program that implements that type is the formal proof that the program is correct. For example, let’s say you’ve implemented a list sorting function, the specification typically then is that the output of the sorting function is ordered, i.e. for any index \(i\) in your output list the element at that index must be smaller or equal to the element at index \(i + 1\). Formally proving that a program is correct with respect to a specification is often as much work as writing the program in the first place, so merely testing it can often be a sweet spot where you get some confidence that the specification is correct, without having to do the proving work. For example in the sorting example you can simply generate a random input list and then compare the output of your sorting function with the one in the standard library (which is likely to be correct). As programs get more complicated the ratio of effort saved by merely testing, as opposed to proving, increases. In fact for bigger programs the effort involved in proving correctness is simply too high for it to be practical (this is an active area of research). Given all this, I hope that you can start to see why this idea excited John.

While John was working on this idea, Koen Claessen, another member of the Functional Programming group, stuck his head into John’s office and asked what he was doing. Koen got excited as well and came back the next day with his improved version of John’s code. There was some things that Koen hadn’t thought about, so John iterated on his code and so it went back and forth for a week until the first implementation of property-based testing was written and not long afterwards they published the paper QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs (ICFP 2000). I think it’s worth stressing the lightweight tool part from the paper’s title, the complete source code for the first version of the library is included in the appendix of the paper and it’s about 300 lines of code.

Haskell and dependently typed programming languages, like Agda, are pure functional programming languages, meaning that it’s possible at the type-level to distinguish whether a function has side-effects or not. Proofs about functions in Agda, and similar languages, are almost always only dealing with pure functions. Probably as a result of this, the first version of QuickCheck can only test pure functions. This shortcoming was rectified in the follow up paper Testing monadic code with QuickCheck (2002) by the same authors. It’s an important extension as it allows us to reason about functions that use mutable state, file I/O and networking, etc. It also lays the foundation for being able to test concurrent programs, as we shall see below.

Around the same time as the second paper was published (2002), John was applying for a major grant at the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation. A part of the application process involved pitching in front of a panel of people from industry. Some person from Ericsson was on the panel and they were interested in QuickCheck. There was also a serial entrepreneur on the panel and she encouraged John to start a company, and the Ericsson person agreed to be a first customer, and so Quviq AB was founded in 20061 by John and Thomas Arts (perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Koen was never involved in the company).

The first project at Ericsson that Quviq helped out testing was written in Erlang. Unlike Haskell, Erlang is not a pure functional programming language and on top of that there’s concurrency everywhere. So even the second, monadic, version of QuickCheck didn’t turn out to be ergonomic enough for the job. This is what motivated the closed source Quviq QuickCheck version written in Erlang, first mentioned in the paper Testing telecoms software with Quviq QuickCheck (2006). The main features of the closed source version that, as we shall see, are still not found in many open source versions are:

  1. Sequential stateful property-based testing using a state machine model;
  2. Parallel testing with race condition detection by reusing the sequential state machine model.

We shall describe how these features work in detail later. For now let’s just note that stateful testing in its current form was first mentioned in QuickCheck testing for fun and profit (2007). This paper also mentions that it took John four iterations to get the stateful testing design right, so while the 2006 paper already does mention stateful testing it’s likely containing one of those earlier iteration of it.

While the 2007 paper also mentions parallel testing via traces and interleavings, it’s vague on details. It’s only later in Finding Race Conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE (ICFP 2009) that parallel testing is described in detail including a reference to Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects by Herlihy and Wing (1990) which is the main technique behind it.

I’d like to stress that no Quviq QuickCheck library code is ever shared in any of these papers, they only contain the library APIs (which are public) and test examples implemented using said APIs.

After that most papers are experience reports of applying Quviq QuickCheck at different companies, e.g. Testing A Database for Race Conditions with QuickCheck (2011), Testing the hard stuff and staying sane (2014), Testing AUTOSAR software with QuickCheck (2015), Mysteries of Dropbox: Property-Based Testing of a Distributed Synchronization Service (2016).

Sometimes various minor extensions to stateful and parallel testings are needed in order to test some particular piece of software, e.g. C FFI bindings in the case of AUTOSAR or eventual consistency in the case of Dropbox, but by and large the stateful and parallel testing features remain the same.

A survey of property-based testing libraries

As we’ve seen above, the current state-of-the-art when it comes to property-based testing is stateful testing via a state machine model and reusing the same sequential state machine model combined with linearisability to achieve parallel testing.

Next let’s survey the most commonly used property-based testing libraries to see how well supported these two testing features are. Let me be clear up front that I’ve not used all of these libraries. My understanding comes from reading the documentation, issue tracker and sometimes source code.

To my best knowledge, as of July 2024, the following table summarises the situation. Please open an issue, PR, or get in touch if you see a mistake or an important omission.

Library Language Stateful Parallel Notes
CsCheck C#
Eris PHP
FsCheck F# Has experimental stateful testing. An issue to add parallel support has been open since 2016.
Gopter Go The README says “No parallel commands … yet?” and there’s an open issue from 2017.
Hedgehog Haskell Has parallel support, but the implementation has issues.
Hypothesis Python
PropEr Erlang First open source library to support both?
QuickCheck Haskell There’s an open issue to add stateful testing since 2016.
QuickTheories Java Has experimental for stateful testing, there’s also some parallel testing, but it’s inefficient and restrictive compared to QuviQ’s Erlang version of QuickCheck. From the source code: “Supplied commands will first be run in sequence and compared against the model, then run concurrently. All possible valid end states of the system will be calculated, then the actual end state compared to this. As the number of possible end states increases rapidly with the number of commands, command lists should usually be constrained to 10 or less.”
Rapid Go
RapidCheck C++ There’s an open issue to add parallel support from 2015.
ScalaCheck Scala Has some support for parallel testing, but it’s limited as can be witnessed by the fact that the two examples of testing LevelDB and Redis both are sequential (threadCount = 1).
Supposition Julia The stateful testing lacks a proper interface though.
SwiftCheck Swift There’s an open issue to add stateful testing from 2016.
fast-check TypeScript Has some support for race condition checking, but it seems different from Quviq QuickCheck’s parallel testing. In particular it doesn’t seem to reuse the sequential state machine model nor use linearisability.
jetCheck Java From the source code “Represents an action with potential side effects, for single-threaded property-based testing of stateful systems.”.
jqwik Java
jsverify JavaScript There’s an open issue to add stateful testing from 2015.
lua-quickcheck Lua
propcheck Elixir There’s an open issue to add parallel testing from 2020.
proptest Rust See proptest-state-machine.
proptest-state-machine Rust Documentation says “Currently, only sequential strategy is supported, but a concurrent strategy is planned to be added at later point.”.
qcheck-stm OCaml
quickcheck Prolog
quickcheck Rust Issue to add stateful testing has been closed.
quickcheck-state-machine Haskell Second open source library with parallel testing support? (I was involved in the development.)
rackcheck Racket
rantly Ruby
stateful-check Clojure
test.check Clojure Someone has implemented stateful testing in a blog post though.
test.contract Clojure
theft C

Analysis

By now I hope that I’ve managed to convince you that most property-based testing libraries do not implement what used to be the state-of-the-art fifteen years ago.

Many libraries lack stateful testing via state machines and most lack parallel testing support. Often users of the libraries have opened tickets asking for these features, but the tickets have stayed open for years without any progress. Furthermore it’s not clear to me whether all libraries that support stateful testing can be generalised to parallel testing without a substantial redesign of their APIs. I don’t think there’s a single example of a library to which parallel testing was added later, rather than designed for from the start.

Why are property-based testing libraries in such a sad state?

Here are three reasons I’ve heard from John:

  1. The stateful and parallel testing features are not as useful as testing pure functions. This is what John told me when I asked him why these features haven’t taken off in the context of Haskell (BobKonf 2017);

  2. The state machine models that one needs to write for the stateful and parallel testing require a different way of thinking compared to normal testing. One can’t merely give these tools to new users without also giving them proper training, John said in an interview;

  3. Open source didn’t work, a closed source product and associated services helps adoption:

    “Thomas Arts and I have founded a start-up, Quviq AB, to develop and market Quviq QuickCheck. Interestingly, this is the second implementation of QuickCheck for Erlang. The first was presented at the Erlang User Conference in 2003, and made available on the web. Despite enthusiasm at the conference, it was never adopted in industry. We tried to give away the technology, and it didn’t work! So now we are selling it, with considerably more success. Of course, Quviq QuickCheck is no longer the same product that was offered in 2003—it has been improved in many ways, adapted in the light of customers’ experience, extended to be simpler to apply to customers’ problems, and is available together with training courses and consultancy. That is, we are putting a great deal of work into helping customers adopt the technology. It was naive to expect that simply putting source code on the web would suffice to make that happen, and it would also be unreasonable to expect funding agencies to pay for all the work involved. In that light, starting a company is a natural way for a researcher to make an impact on industrial practice—and so far, at least, it seems to be succeeding.”

A cynic might argue that there’s a conflict of interest between doing research and education on one hand and running a company that sells licenses, training and consulting on the other.

Let me be clear that I’ve the utmost respect for John, and I believe what he says to be true and I believe he acts with the best intentions. Having said that let me try to address John’s points.

Stateful and parallel testing isn’t as useful as pure testing

I think many people will agree that separating pure from side-effectful code is good practice in any programming language, and I do agree with John that you can get far by merely property-based testing those pure fragments.

However, I also think that stateful and parallel testing is almost equally important for many non-trivial software systems. Most systems in industry will have some database, stateful protocol or use concurrent data structures, which all benefit from the stateful and parallel testing features.

Stateful modelling requires training

Regarding formal specification requiring a special way of thinking and therefor training, I believe this is a correct assessment. However I also believe that this is already true for property-based testing of pure functions. A non-trained user of pure property-based testing will likely test less interesting properties than someone who’s trained.

Given that John has written papers and given talks on the topic of making property-based testing of pure functions more accessible to programmers, one might wonder why we cannot do the same for stateful and parallel testing?

The experience reports, that we’ve mentioned above, usually contain some novelty (which warrants publishing a new paper) rather than general advice which can be done with the vanilla stateful and parallel testing features. Furthermore they require buying a Quviq license in order to reproduce the results, a show stopper for many people.

I think it’s also worth stressing that stateful specifications are not necessarily always more difficult than specifications for pure functions. For example, to model a key-value store one can get quite far with the model being a list of key-value pairs. In fact a simple model like that managed to find a 17 step (shrunk) counterexample in LevelDB to a known issue, within mere minutes. It took weeks for Google to provide a fix, and then after running the property again on the fixed code a new 31 step counterexample was found within minutes. Turns out there was a bug in the background compaction process. The compaction process improves read performance and reclaims disk space, which is important for a key-value store, but interestingly it’s not explicitly part of the model. Joseph W Norton gave a talk at LambdaJam 2013 about it.

Closed source helps industry adoption

Regarding keeping the source closed helping with adoption, I think this is perhaps the most controversial point that John makes.

If we try to see it from John’s perspective, how else would an academic get funding to work on tooling (which typically isn’t recognised as doing research), or feedback from industry? Surely, one cannot expect research funding agencies to pay for this?

On the other hand one could ask why there isn’t a requirement that published research should be reproducible using open source tools (or at least tools that are freely available to the public and other researchers)? Trying to replicate the results from the Quviq QuickCheck papers (from 2006 and onward) without buying a Quviq QuickCheck license, is almost impossible without a lot of reverse engineering work.

I suppose one could argue that one could have built a business around an open source tool, only charging for the training and consulting, but given how broken open source is today, unless you are a big company (which takes more than it gives back), it’s definitely not clear that it would have worked (and it was probably even worse back in 2006).

Even if John is right and that keeping it closed source has helped adoption in industry, I think it’s by now fair to say it has not helped open source adoption. Or perhaps another way to look at it, it’s unlikely that a company that pays for a license in Erlang would then go and port the library in another language.

What can we do about it?

I think there’s at least two things worth trying.

  1. Provide a short open source implementation of stateful and parallel property-based testing, analogous to the original ~300 lines of code QuickCheck implementation.

    Perhaps part of the original QuickCheck library’s success in spreading to so many other languages can be attributed to the fact that its small implementation and that it is part of the original paper?

  2. Try to make the formal specification part easier, so that we don’t need to train developers (as much).

    Perhaps we can avoid state machines as basis for specifications and instead reuse concepts that programmers are already familiar with from their current testing activities, e.g. mocking and test doubles more generally?

Synthesis

In order to test the above hypothesis, I’d like to spend the rest of this post as follows:

  1. Show how one can implement stateful and parallel property-based testing in about 400 lines of code (similar to the size of the original QuickCheck implementation);

  2. Make specifications simpler by using in-memory reference implementations similar to mocks, more accurately called fakes, rather than state machines.

Before we get started with stateful testing, let’s first recap how property-based testing of pure functions works.

Pure property-based testing recap

It’s considered good practice to test new functions or functionality, to make sure it does what we want. For example, imagine we’ve written a linked-list reversal function called reverse, then it might be sensible to test it against a couple of lists such as the empty list and, say, the three element list [1, 2, 3].

How does one choose which example inputs to test against though? Typically one wants to choose corner cases, such as the empty list, that perhaps were overlooked during the implementation. It’s difficult to think of corner cases that you might have overlooked (because if you can then you probably wouldn’t have overlooked them in the first place)! This is where generating random inputs, a key feature of property-based testing, comes in. The idea being that random inputs will eventually hit corner cases.

When we manually pick inputs for our tests, like [1, 2, 3], we know what the output should be and so we can make the appropriate assertion, i.e. reverse [1, 2, 3] == [3, 2, 1]. When we generate random inputs we don’t always know what the output should be. This is where writing properties that relate the output to the input somehow comes in. For example, while we don’t know what the output of reversing an arbitrary list is, we do know that reversing it twice will give back the input. This is how we can express this property in QuickCheck:

>>> quickCheck (\(xs :: [Int]) -> reverse (reverse xs) == xs)
+++ OK, passed 100 tests.

By default 100 tests get generated, but that can be adjusted:

>>> quickCheck (withMaxSuccess 5 (\(xs :: [Int]) -> reverse (reverse xs) == xs))
+++ OK, passed 5 tests.

We can see what test get generated using verboseCheck:

>>> verboseCheck (withMaxSuccess 5 (\(xs :: [Int]) -> reverse (reverse xs) == xs))
Passed:
[]

Passed:
[1]

Passed:
[-2]

Passed:
[2]

Passed:
[-4,-2,-2,3]

+++ OK, passed 5 tests.

Or by using sample on the appropriate Generator. In this case we are generating lists of integers, hence the Gen [Int] type annotation:

>>> sample (arbitrary :: Gen [Int])
[]
[]
[-2,2,3,-2]
[-4]
[4,6,-2,-6,-1]
[1,7,5,-8,1]
[-11,4]
[3,-1,11]
[]
[-3,17,-14,-1,17,18,-8,-9,-13,-7]
[6,19,6,9,-15,-6,-19]

The list and integer generators are provided by the library and I hope you agree that these seem like sensible arbitrary lists to use in our tests.

Next let’s have a look at when a property fails. For example this is what happens if we try to test that the output of reversing a list is the input list:

>>> quickCheck (\(xs :: [Int]) -> reverse xs == xs)
*** Failed! Falsified (after 3 tests and 2 shrinks):
[0,1]

We see that after 3 tests a test case was generated that failed, the input got shrunk twice and the minimal counterexample [0, 1] is presented. Notice that we do need a list that is at least of length two, because any shorter list will reverse to itself.

As pointed out earlier, coming up with these properties is not easy. There are however a few patterns that come up over and over again. With reverse we saw an example of an involutory function, i.e. f (f x) == x, here are a few other examples:

  • Inverses, e.g. \(i :: Input) -> deserialise (serialise i) == i;
  • Idempotency, e.g. \(xs :: [Int]) -> sort (sort xs) == sort xs;
  • Associativity, e.g. \(i j k :: Int) -> (i + j) + k == i + (j + k);
  • Axioms of abstract data types, e.g. \(x :: Int)(xs :: [Int]) -> member x (insert x xs) && not (member x (remove x xs));
  • Metamorphic properties, e.g. \(g :: Graph)(m n :: Node) -> shortestPath g m n == shortestPath g n m.

Readers familiar with discrete math might recognise some of the above.

Stateful property-based testing

In the pure property-based testing case, that we just looked at, the picture of the test setup looks a bit like this:

         +-----+
      i  |     |  o
    ----->  f  +---->
         |     |
         +-----+

Where i is the input we generate, f is the function we are applying the generated input to produce the output o. In the case of the reverse example, from before, i and o are of type list of integers ([Int]), f is reverse . reverse and the property that we check for every generated input is that input is equal to the output.

Next let’s contrast this picture with how the test setup looks when we are testing a stateful component. A simple example of a stateful component is a counter with an increment operation which increment the counter and returns the old count.

Unlike in the pure case, the same input will not give the same output. For example the first time we do incr we get back 0 (if we start counting from zero) while the second time we do incr we get 1. A database or a file system are two other examples of stateful components, where the history of previous inputs affects the output of the next input.

In the stateful case, the picture looks more like this:

    +------+     +------+     +------+
    |      | i1  |      | i2  |      |
    |  s0  +----->  s1  +----->  s2  | ...
    |      |     |      |     |      |
    +------+     +--+---+     +--+---+
                    |            |
                    | o1         | o2
                    v            v

    ---------------------------------> time

Where s is the state, i is an input (e.g. incr) and o is an output. Notice how the state evolves over time and depends on the history of inputs.

In the pure case each test case is a single input, in the stateful case we need a sequence of inputs in order to test how the system changes over time. In the pure case our properties were relations on the input and output, i.e. R : i -> o -> Bool. In the stateful case our properties would need to be generalised to R' : [i] -> [o] -> Bool to account for how the state changes over time. Writing such properties is cumbersome, an alternative is to account for the state explicitly by means of some kind of model.

This is where our in-memory reference implementation, or fake, comes in. We’ll use a function of type m -> i -> (m, o), i.e. from the old model and an input compute the next model and the output. From this we can derive a property that for each input checks if the outputs of the stateful component agrees with the output of the fake:

         +------+     +------+     +------+
         |      | i1  |      | i2  |      |
 real:   |  s0  +----->  s1  +----->  s2  | ...
         |      |     |      |     |      |
         +------+     +--++--+     +--++--+
                         ||           ||
                         ||o1         || o2
                         ||           ||
         +------+     +--++--+     +--++--+
         |      | i1  |      | i2  |      |
 fake:   |  m0  +----->  m1  +----->  m2  | ...
         |      |     |      |     |      |
         +------+     +------+     +------+

         ---------------------------------> time

In case the outputs disagree we shrink the sequence of inputs and try to present the smallest counterexample, as in the pure case.

Let’s make things more concrete with some actual code that we can run.

Example: counter

All examples, in the rest of this post, will have three parts:

  1. The software under test;
  2. The model that the software under test gets tested against;
  3. The generated tests and output from running them.

The first part is independent of the stateful testing library we are building. The second part is hooking up the first part to the library by implementing an interface (type class). We’ll look at the definition of the type class after the example. The final part is how to write the actual property and interpret the output from running them.

Software under test

This is how you can implement a counter using a global mutable variable in Haskell:

gLOBAL_COUNTER :: IORef Int
gLOBAL_COUNTER = unsafePerformIO (newIORef 0)
{-# NOINLINE gLOBAL_COUNTER #-}

incr :: IO ()
incr = do
  n <- readIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER
  writeIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER (n + 1)

get :: IO Int
get = readIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER

Notice that here incr doesn’t return the old value, like above, and instead we have a separate operation get which returns the current value of the counter.

Model

To model our counter we’ll use an integer.

newtype Counter = Counter Int
  deriving (Eq, Show)

-- We'll come back to the definition of the `StateModel` type class after this
-- example.
instance StateModel Counter where

  -- We start counting from zero.
  initialState :: Counter
  initialState = Counter 0

  -- The commands correspond to the names of the functions that operate on the
  -- global counter.
  data Command Counter r
    = Incr
    | Get
    deriving (Show, Functor)

  -- The responses correspond to the return types of each function. By
  -- convention we'll add a underscore suffix to a response of the corresponding
  -- command.
  data Response Counter r
    = Incr_ ()
    | Get_ Int
    deriving (Eq, Show, Functor, Foldable)

  -- The state machine takes a command and the model of the counter and returns
  -- a new model and a response. We'll come back to the role of the `Either` later.
  runFake :: Command Counter r -> Counter -> Either Void (Counter, Response Counter r)
  runFake Incr  (Counter n) = return (Counter (n + 1), Incr_ ())
  runFake Get m@(Counter n) = return (m, Get_ n)

  -- We also need to explain which part of the counter API each command
  -- corresponds to.
  runReal :: Command Counter r -> IO (Response Counter r)
  runReal Get  = Get_  <$> get
  runReal Incr = Incr_ <$> incr

  -- We'll generate increments and reads of the counter with equal probability.
  -- Notice that we only need to explain how to generate a single command, the
  -- library will use this to generate sequences of commands as we'll see later.
  generateCommand :: Counter -> Gen (Command Counter r)
  generateCommand _s = elements [Incr, Get]

A common complaint is that the model (Counter and runFake) is as big as the implementation itself. This is true, because it’s an example. In reality the model will often be many orders of magnitude smaller. This is due to the fact that the model, unlike the real implementation, doesn’t need to persisting to disk, communicating over the network, or perform various time or space optimisations. Recall the LevelDB example from above.

Tests

The tests, or property, can now be written as follows.

prop_counter :: Commands Counter -> Property
prop_counter cmds = monadicIO $ do
  runCommands cmds
  run reset
  assert True

reset :: IO ()
reset = writeIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER 0

To run them, we can load the module and type quickCheck prop_counter in the REPL, which gives us an output like:

+++ OK, passed 100 tests:
89% Get
85% Incr

Commands (2151 in total):
52.02% Get
47.98% Incr

Where the first group of percentages tell us the proportion of tests that contained the get and increment command respectively, and the second group of percentages tell us the proportion of get and increment commands out of all commands generated. Note that the first group doesn’t add up to 100%, because most tests will contain both commands, whereas the second group does. The reason the second group is almost 50-50 is because in the generator we generate both commands with equal probability.

Another thing to note is that we need to reset the counter between tests, otherwise the global counter will have the value from the last test while the model always starts from zero and we get a mismatch.

To make things a bit more interesting, let’s introduce a bug into our counter and see if the tests can find it. Let’s make it so that if the counter has the value of 42, then it won’t increment properly.

incr42Bug :: IO ()
incr42Bug = do
  n <- readIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER
  let n' = if n == 42
           then n -- BUG
           else n + 1
  writeIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER n'

We also need to change the runReal function to use our buggy increment as follows.

- runReal Incr = Incr_ <$> incr
+ runReal Incr = Incr_ <$> incr42Bug

When we run the property now, we’ll see something like the following output.

*** Failed! Assertion failed (after 66 tests and 29 shrinks):
    Commands [Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Incr,Get]
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Incr --> Incr_ ()
    Get --> Get_ 42

    Expected: Get_ 43
    Got: Get_ 42

Notice that this is indeed the smallest counterexample and how it took 66 randomly generated test cases to find the sequence of inputs that triggered the bug and then 29 shrink steps for QuickCheck to minimise it.

Stateful library implementation

In the example above we implemented the StateModel interface (or type class), next we’ll have a look at the definition of this interface and the testing functionality we can derive by programming against the interface.

Stateful testing interface

Let me give you the full definition of the interface and then I’ll explain it in words afterwards.

class ( ...
      ) => StateModel state where

  -- If we think of the system under test as a black box, then commands are the
  -- inputs and responses the outputs to the black box.
  data Command  state :: Type -> Type
  data Response state :: Type -> Type

  -- Sometimes a command needs to refer to a previous response, e.g. when a file
  -- is opened we get a handle which is later refered to when writing or reading
  -- form the file. File handles, and similar constructs, are called references
  -- and can be part of commands and responses.
  type Reference state :: Type
  type Reference state = Void

  -- Not all commands are valid in all states. Pre-conditions allow the user to
  -- specify when a command is safe to execute, for example we cannot write or
  -- read to or from an unopened file. The `PreconditionFailure` data type
  -- allows the user to create custom pre-condition failures. By default now
  -- pre-condition failures are allowed, thus the `Void` (empty) type.
  type PreconditionFailure state :: Type
  type PreconditionFailure state = Void


  generateCommand :: state -> Gen (Command state (Var (Reference state)))

  shrinkCommand :: state -> Command state (Var (Reference state))
                -> [Command state (Var (Reference state))]
  shrinkCommand _state _cmd = []

  initialState :: state

  runFake :: Command state (Var (Reference state)) -> state
          -> Either (PreconditionFailure state)
                    (state, Response state (Var (Reference state)))

  runReal :: Command state (Reference state)
          -> CommandMonad state (Response state (Reference state))

  monitoring :: (state, state)
             -> Command state (Reference state)
             -> Response state (Reference state)
             -> Property -> Property
  monitoring _states _cmd _resp = id

  commandName :: (Show (Command state ref), Show ref)
              => Command state ref -> String
  commandName = head . words . show

  -- Most often the result of executing a command against the system under test
  -- will live in the IO monad, but sometimes it can be useful to be able a
  -- choose another monad.
  type CommandMonad state :: Type -> Type
  type CommandMonad state = IO

The interface is parametrised by a state type that the user needs to define before instantiating the interface. In the counter example state is newtype Counter = Counter Int. The user needs to provide an initialState :: state from which we’ll start generating commands and executing the model, in the counter case this is Counter 0.

As part of the instantiating the user also needs to specify a type of Commands and Responses, these were the Incr and Get operations of the counter and their response types respectively.

In addition there’s also three optional types, that we’ve not needed in the counter example. The first is references, these are used to refer to previously created resources. For example if we open a file handle on a POSIX-like file system, then later commands need to be able to refer to that file handle when wanting to write or read from it. The second datatype is PreconditionFailure, which is used to give a nice error message when a command is executed in a disallowed state. For example if we try to read from a file handle that has been closed. The third data type is CommandMonad which let’s us use a different monad than IO for executing our commands in. After we’ve finished with the interface definition we’ll come back to more examples where we’ll use these optional types, hopefully these examples will help make things more concrete.

We’ve already seen that the user needs to provide a way to generate single command, the only thing worth mentioning is that in case our commands contain references then during generation we only deal with Vars of references, where data Var a = Var Int. The reason for this is that we cannot generate, for example, real file handles (only the operating system can), so instead we generate “symbolic” references which are just Ints. Think of these as placeholders for which real references will be substituted in once the real references are created during execution.

Shrinking of individual commands is optional and disabled by default, but as we’ve seen this doesn’t exclude the sequence of commands to be shrunk. We’ll shall see shortly how that is done in detail.

Next up we got runFake and runReal which executes a command against the state model and the real system respectively. Notice how runFake can fail with a PreconditionFailure, whereas runReal is always expected to succeed (because if a command fails the precondition check, then it won’t get generated and hence never reach runReal). Another difference is that runFake uses symbolic references, while runReal deals with real references. We’ll shortly see how this substitution of references works.

Lastly we have two optional functions related to keeping statistics of generated test cases, which is useful for coverage reporting among other things. We’ll come back to how these can be used as we look at more examples after we’ve defined our stateful property-based testing library.

Generating and shrinking

Once we have our interface we can start writing functions against the interface. These functions are what the user gets once they implement the interface. In this section we’ll have a look at generation of sequences of Commands, which will be the inputs for our tests, and how to shrink said inputs to produce a minimal counterexample.

Let’s start by defining Commands, notice that they use symbolic references (i.e. Var (Reference state)):

newtype Commands state = Commands
  { unCommands :: [Command state (Var (Reference state))] }

As mentioned above, when we generate commands we cannot generate real references, e.g. file handles, thus Var (Reference state) is used which is isomorphic to just an Int.

Sometimes it’s convenient to split up runFake into two parts, the first checks if the command is allowed in the current state, i.e. the precondition holds:

precondition :: StateModel state
             => state -> Command state (Var (Reference state)) -> Bool
precondition s cmd = case runFake cmd s of
  Left _  -> False
  Right _ -> True

And the second part advances the state:

nextState :: StateModel state
          => state -> Command state (Var (Reference state)) -> state
nextState s cmd = case runFake cmd s of
  Right (s', _) -> s'
  Left _err -> error "nextState: impossible, we checked for success in precondition"

We assume that we’ll only ever look at the nextState when the precondition holds.

Using these two functions we can implement QuickCheck’s Arbitrary type class for Commands which let’s us generate and shrink Commands:

instance StateModel state => Arbitrary (Commands state) where

  arbitrary :: Gen (Commands state)
  arbitrary = Commands <$> genCommands initialState
    where
      genCommands :: StateModel state
                  => state -> Gen [Command state (Var (Reference state))]
      genCommands s = sized $ \n ->
        let
          w = n `div` 2 + 1
        in
          frequency
            [ (1, return [])
            , (w, do mcmd <- generateCommand s `suchThatMaybe` precondition s
                     case mcmd of
                       Nothing  -> return []
                       Just cmd -> (cmd :) <$> genCommands (nextState s cmd))
            ]

  shrink :: Commands state -> [Commands state]
  shrink = pruneShrinks . possibleShrinks
    where
      possibleShrinks :: Commands state -> [Commands state]
      possibleShrinks = map (Commands . map fst) . shrinkList shrinker
                      . withStates initialState . unCommands
        where
          shrinker (cmd, s) = [ (cmd', s) | cmd' <- shrinkCommand s cmd ]

          withStates :: StateModel state
                     => state -> [Command state (Var (Reference state))]
                     -> [(Command state (Var (Reference state)), state)]
          withStates s0 = go s0 []
            where
              go _s acc []           = reverse acc
              go  s acc (cmd : cmds) = go (nextState s cmd) ((cmd, s) : acc) cmds

      pruneShrinks :: [Commands state] -> [Commands state]
      pruneShrinks = coerce . filter (not . null)
                   . map (go initialState Set.empty [] . unCommands)
        where
          go _s _vars acc [] = reverse acc
          go  s  vars acc (cmd : cmds)
            | not (scopeCheck vars cmd) = go s vars acc cmds
            | otherwise = case runFake cmd s of
                Left _preconditionFailure -> go s vars acc cmds
                Right (s', resp) ->
                  let
                    returnedVars = Set.fromList (toList resp)
                    vars' = returnedVars `Set.union` vars
                  in
                    go s' vars' (cmd : acc) cmds

scopeCheck :: Foldable (Command state)
           => Set (Var a) -> Command state (Var a) -> Bool
scopeCheck varsInScope cmd = usedVars `Set.isSubsetOf` varsInScope
  where
    usedVars = Set.fromList (toList cmd)

Notice how after shrinking we prune away all commands that don’t pass the precondition or that are out of scope with respect to symbolic references.

The intuition here is that as we remove commands from the originally generated Commands (which all pass their preconditions), we might have broken some preconditions and pruning simply removes the commands which we made invalid in the process of shrinking. Similarly we can have a command that creates a reference that later commands then depend on, if we during shrinking remove the command that created the reference then we must also remove the commands that depend on the reference.

Running and assertion checking

Once we’ve generated Commands we need to execute them against the model and the real system using runFake and runReal. In the process of doing so runReal will produce References that later commands might use, so we also need to substitute symbolic references for real references. This, together with coverage statistics bookkeeping, is done in the runCommands function:

runCommands :: forall state. StateModel state
            => Commands state -> PropertyM (CommandMonad state) ()
runCommands (Commands cmds0) = go initialState emptyEnv cmds0
  where
    go :: state -> Env state -> [Command state (Var (Reference state))]
       -> PropertyM (CommandMonad state) ()
    go _state _env [] = return ()
    go  state  env (cmd : cmds) = do
      case runFake cmd state of
        Left err -> do
          monitor (counterexample ("Preconditon failed: " ++ show err))
          assert False
        Right (state', resp) -> do
          let name = commandName cmd
          monitor (tabulate "Commands" [name] . classify True name)
          -- Here we substitute all symbolic references for real ones:
          let ccmd = fmap (lookupEnv env) cmd
          cresp <- run (runReal ccmd)
          monitor (counterexample (show cmd ++ " --> " ++ show cresp))
          monitor (monitoring (state, state') ccmd cresp)
          -- Here we collect all references from the response and store it in
          -- our environment, so that subsequence commands can be substituted.
          let refs   = toList cresp
              env'   = extendEnv env (zip [sizeEnv env..] refs)
              cresp' = fmap (lookupEnv env') resp
              ok     = cresp == cresp'
          unless ok $
            monitor (counterexample ("Expected: " ++ show cresp' ++ "\nGot: " ++ show cresp))
          -- And finally here's where we assert that the model and the real
          -- implementation agree.
          assert ok
          go state' env' cmds

Where Env is defined as follows.

newtype Env state = Env { unEnv :: IntMap (Reference state) }

That’s all the pieces we need to implement that Counter example that we saw above, plus some new constructs to deal with precondition failures and references.

Next let’s have a look at an example where we need preconditions and references.

Example: circular buffer

This example is taken from John’s paper Testing the hard stuff and staying sane (2014).

Software under test

The implementation is written in C and uses two indices which keep track of the front and back of the queue, this allows us to implement the queue in a circular fashion. I’ve copied the C code straight from the paper. In order to test it from Haskell, we’ll use Haskell’s foreign function interface.

typedef struct queue {
  int *buf;
  int inp, outp, size;
} Queue;

Queue *new(int n) {
  int *buff = malloc(n*sizeof(int));
  Queue q = {buff,0,0,n};
  Queue *qptr = malloc(sizeof(Queue));
  *qptr = q;
  return qptr;
}

void put(Queue *q, int n) {
  q->buf[q->inp] = n;
  q->inp = (q->inp + 1) % q->size;
}

int get(Queue *q) {
  int ans = q->buf[q->outp];
  q->outp = (q->outp + 1) % q->size;
  return ans;
}

int size(Queue *q) {
  return (q->inp - q->outp) % q->size;
}

Notice that the C code doesn’t do any error checking, e.g. if we get from an empty queue then we’ll get back uninitialised memory.

Model

The circular buffer implementation is efficient, because it reuses the allocated memory as we go around in circles, but it’s not obviously correct.

To model queues we’ll use a more straight forward non-circular implementation. This is less efficient (doesn’t matter as it’s merely used during testing), but hopefully more obviously correct.

data FQueue = FQueue
  { fqElems :: [Int]
  , fqSize  :: Int
  }

In the Counter example above we only had one counter, so the model was merely a single integer. In this example, because of new returning a queue, we need to be able to model arbitrary many queues. We can do this using symbolic references (data Var a = Var Int) as follows:

type State = Map (Var Queue) FQueue

emptyState :: State
emptyState = Map.empty

Where Queue is the Haskell data type that corresponds to the C Queue and the Var a data type is provided by the library and is a symbolic reference to a (just an Integer). The idea being that in the model we don’t have access to real Queues, merely symbolic references to them. This might seem a bit strange, but I hope that it will become more clear when we model new.

type FakeOp a = State -> Either Err (State, a)

fNew :: Int -> FakeOp (Var Queue)
fNew sz s =
  let
    v  = Var (Map.size s)
    s' = Map.insert v (FQueue [] sz) s
  in
    return (s', v)

As we have access to the state when defining our model, we can create new unique symbolic references by simply counting how many symbolic references we’ve created previously (using Map.size)2.

As we said before, in the C code we don’t do any error checking. In the model we do check that, for example, the queue is non-empty before we fGet an item. These are our preconditions.

data Err
  = QueueDoesNotExist
  | QueueIsEmpty
  deriving (Eq, Show)


fPut :: Var Queue -> Int -> FakeOp ()
fPut q i s
  | q `Map.notMember` s = Left QueueDoesNotExist
  | otherwise = return (Map.adjust (\fq -> fq { fqElems = fqElems fq ++ [i] }) q s, ())

fGet :: Var Queue -> FakeOp Int
fGet q s
  | q `Map.notMember` s = Left QueueDoesNotExist
  | otherwise = case fqElems (s Map.! q) of
      []     -> Left QueueIsEmpty
      i : is -> return (Map.adjust (\fq -> fq { fqElems = is }) q s, i)

fSize :: Var Queue -> FakeOp Int
fSize q s
  | q `Map.notMember` s = Left QueueDoesNotExist
  | otherwise           = return (s, length (fqElems (s Map.! q)))

Recall that we won’t generate a get operation unless the precondition holds in the state that we are currently in, i.e. we will never generate gets if the queue is empty and thus we’ll never execute the C code for get which gives back uninitialised memory.

Having defined our model the interface implementation is almost mechanical.

instance StateModel State where

  initialState = Map.empty

  type Reference State = Queue

  type PreconditionFailure State = Err

  data Command State q
    = New Int
    | Put q Int
    | Get q
    | Size q
    deriving (Show, Functor, Foldable)

  data Response State q
    = New_ q
    | Put_ ()
    | Get_ Int
    | Size_ Int
    deriving (Eq, Show, Functor, Foldable)

  generateCommand s
    | Map.null s = New . getPositive <$> arbitrary
    | otherwise  = oneof
      [ New . getPositive <$> arbitrary
      , Put  <$> arbitraryQueue <*> arbitrary
      , Get  <$> arbitraryQueue
      ]
    where
      arbitraryQueue :: Gen (Var Queue)
      arbitraryQueue = elements (Map.keys s)

  shrinkCommand _s (New i)   = [ New i'   | Positive i' <- shrink (Positive i) ]
  shrinkCommand _s (Put q i) = [ Put q i' | i' <- shrink i ]
  shrinkCommand _s _cmd = []

  runFake (New sz)  s = fmap New_  <$> fNew sz s
  runFake (Put q i) s = fmap Put_  <$> fPut q i s
  runFake (Get q)   s = fmap Get_  <$> fGet q s
  runFake (Size q)  s = fmap Size_ <$> fSize q s

  -- Here `new`, `put`, `get` and `size` are FFI wrappers for their respective C
  -- functions.
  runReal (New sz)  = New_  <$> new sz
  runReal (Put q i) = Put_  <$> put q i
  runReal (Get q)   = Get_  <$> get q
  runReal (Size q)  = Size_ <$> size q

The only new thing worth paying attention to is the q in Command and Response, which is parametrised so that it works for both symbolic and real references. The Functor instance lets us do substitution, while Foldable lets us extract all new references from a response, so that we can substitute them in later Commands.

Testing

Having implemented the interface, we can write our property as follows.

prop_queue :: Commands State -> Property
prop_queue cmds = monadicIO $ do
  runCommands cmds
  assert True

When we run it, using quickCheck prop_queue, we get the following error.

   *** Failed! Assertion failed (after 7 tests and 5 shrinks):
    Commands {unCommands = [New 1,Put (Var 0) 0,Put (Var 0) 1,Get (Var 0)]}
    New 1 --> New_ (Queue 0x00000000016e9010)
    Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
    Put (Var 0) 1 --> Put_ ()
    Get (Var 0) --> Get_ 1
    Expected: Get_ 0
    Got: Get_ 1

So we create a new queue of size 1, put two items (0 and 1) into it, and finally we read a value from the queue and this is where the assertion fails. Or model returns 0, because it’s a FIFO queue, but the C code returns 1. The reason for this is that in the C code there’s no error checking, so writing a value to a full queue simply overwrites the oldest value. So there’s actually nothing wrong with the implementation, but rather the model is wrong. We’ve forgotten a precondition:

 data Err
   = QueueDoesNotExist
   | QueueIsEmpty
+  | QueueIsFull
fPut :: Var Queue -> Int -> State -> Either Err (State, ())
fPut q i s
  | q `Map.notMember` s = Left QueueDoesNotExist
+ | length (fqElems (s Map.! q)) >= fqSize (s Map.! q) = Left QueueIsFull
  | otherwise = return (Map.adjust (\fq -> fq { fqElems = fqElems fq ++ [i] }) q s, ())

We can add the counterexample that we got as a regression test to our test suite as follows:

unit_queueFull :: IO ()
unit_queueFull = quickCheck (withMaxSuccess 1 (expectFailure (prop_queue cmds)))
  where
    cmds = Commands
      [ New 1
      , Put (Var 0) 1
      , Put (Var 0) 0
      , Get (Var 0)
      ]

Notice that we can basically copy-paste cmds from QuickCheck’s output, but I’ve done some formatting here to make it more readable.

After fixing the precondition for fPut, unit_queueFull fails as follows:

+++ OK, failed as expected. Assertion failed (after 1 test):
New 1 --> New_ (Queue 0x00000000006f6d20)
Put (Var 0) 1 --> Put_ ()
Preconditon failed: QueueIsFull

When we rerun quickCheck prop_queue we will not generate this example again, because all preconditions need to hold, and the property passes:

>>> quickCheck prop_queue
+++ OK, passed 100 tests:
95% New
86% Put
67% Get

Commands (2497 in total):
44.13% New
41.25% Put
14.62% Get

However as we can see in the output there’s no coverage for Size! The reason for this is because we’ve forgot to add it to our generator:

  generateCommand s
    | Map.null s = New . getPositive <$> arbitrary
    | otherwise  = oneof
      [ New . getPositive <$> arbitrary
      , Put  <$> arbitraryQueue <*> arbitrary
      , Get  <$> arbitraryQueue
+     , Size <$> arbitraryQueue
      ]

After adding it and rerunning the property, we get the following error:

>>> quickCheck prop_queue
*** Failed! Assertion failed (after 25 tests and 8 shrinks):
Commands {unCommands = [New 1,Put (Var 0) 0,Size (Var 0)]}
New 1 --> New_ (Queue 0x0000000001444220)
Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
Size (Var 0) --> Size_ 0
Expected: Size_ 1
Got: Size_ 0

Size should return how many items are in the queue, so after we put one item into a queue we expect it to return 1, but in the above counterexample it returns 0.

To understand why this happens we have to look at how put and size are implemented:

void put(Queue *q, int n) {
  q->buf[q->inp] = n;
  q->inp = (q->inp + 1) % q->size;
}

int size(Queue *q) {
  return (q->inp - q->outp) % q->size;
}

In put when we do q->inp = (q->inp + 1) % q->size we get q->inp = (0 + 1) % 1 == 0 and then when we calculate the size we get (0 - 0) % 1 == 0. One way to fix this is to make q->size be n + 1 rather than n where n is the size parameter of new, that way put will do q->inp = (0 + 1) % 2 == 1 instead and size will be 1 - 0 % 2 == 1 which is correct. Here’s the diff:

  Queue *new(int n) {
-   int *buff = malloc(n*sizeof(int));
-   Queue q = {buff,0,0,n};
+   int *buff = malloc((n + 1)*sizeof(int));
+   Queue q = {buff,0,0,n + 1};
    Queue *qptr = malloc(sizeof(Queue));
    *qptr = q;
    return qptr;
}

As before, we can add a regression test for the size issue as follows:

unit_queueSize :: IO ()
unit_queueSize = quickCheck (withMaxSuccess 1 (prop_queue cmds))
  where
    cmds = Commands
      [ New 1
      , Put (Var 0) 0
      , Size (Var 0)
      ]

After the change to new this test passes, but if we rerun the property we get the following error:

*** Failed! Assertion failed (after 38 tests and 12 shrinks):
Commands {unCommands = [New 1,Put (Var 0) 0,Get (Var 0),Put (Var 0) 0,Size (Var 0)]}
New 1 --> New_ (Queue 0x00007fd47c00a920)
Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
Get (Var 0) --> Get_ 0
Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
Size (Var 0) --> Size_ (-1)
Expected: Size_ 1
Got: Size_ (-1)

After the second put we’ll have q->inp = (1 + 1) % 2 == 0 while q->outp = 1 due to the get and so when we call size we get 0 - 1 % 2 == -1. Taking the absolute value:

  int size(Queue *q) {
-   return (q->inp - q->outp) % q->size;
+   return abs(q->inp - q->outp) % q->size;
  }

Makes this test case pass, and in fact it also makes the property pass:

>>> quickCheck prop_queue
+++ OK, passed 100 tests:
93% New
79% Put
74% Size
59% Get

Commands (2340 in total):
32.09% New
29.06% Size
28.25% Put
10.60% Get

John says that at this point most programmers would probably be happy and believe that their implementation works, but if we rerun it again (or increase the amount of tests generated), we get:

>>> quickCheck prop_queue
*** Failed! Assertion failed (after 56 tests and 19 shrinks):
Commands {unCommands = [New 2,Put (Var 0) 0,Put (Var 0) 0,Get (Var 0),Put (Var 0) 0,Size (Var 0)]}
New 2 --> New_ (Queue 0x00007fbf4c006490)
Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
Get (Var 0) --> Get_ 0
Put (Var 0) 0 --> Put_ ()
Size (Var 0) --> Size_ 1
Expected: Size_ 2
Got: Size_ 1

We can see that all queues of size 1 now work, because this test starts by creating a queue of size 2, so we’ve made progress. But taking the absolute value isn’t the correct way to calculate the size (even though it works for queues of size 1), the following is the correct way to do it:

  int size(Queue *q) {
-   return abs(q->inp - q->outp) % q->size;
+   return (q->inp - q->outp + q->size) % q->size;
  }

With this final tweak, the property passes. I hope that this somewhat long example gives you a feel for how property-based testing drives the development and debugging of the code.

Example: jug puzzle from Die Hard 3

In the movie Die Hard 3 there’s a scene where Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have to solve a puzzle in order to stop a bomb from going off. The puzzle is: given a 3L and a 5L jug, how can you measure exactly 4L?

I first saw this example solved using TLA+ and I wanted to include it here because it shows that we don’t necessarily need a real implementation, merely running the model/fake can be useful.

The main idea is to model the two jugs and all actions we can do with them and then throw an exception when the big jug contains 4L. This will fail the test and output the shrunk sequence of actions that resulted in the failure, giving us the solution to the puzzle.

data Model = Model
  { bigJug   :: Int
  , smallJug :: Int
  }
  deriving (Eq, Show)

instance StateModel Model where

  initialState = Model 0 0

  type Reference Model = Void

  data Command Model r
    = FillBig
    | FillSmall
    | EmptyBig
    | EmptySmall
    | SmallIntoBig
    | BigIntoSmall
    deriving (Show, Enum, Bounded, Functor, Foldable)

  data Response Model r = Done | BigJugIs4
    deriving (Eq, Show, Functor, Foldable)

  generateCommand :: Model -> Gen (Command Model r)
  generateCommand _s = elements [minBound ..]

  runFake :: Command Model r -> Model -> Either void (Model, Response Model r)
  runFake FillBig      s = done s { bigJug   = 5 }
  runFake FillSmall    s = done s { smallJug = 3 }
  runFake EmptyBig     s = done s { bigJug   = 0 }
  runFake EmptySmall   s = done s { smallJug = 0 }
  runFake SmallIntoBig (Model big small) =
    let big' = min 5 (big + small) in
    done (Model { bigJug = big'
                , smallJug = small - (big' - big) })
  runFake BigIntoSmall (Model big small) =
    let small' = min 3 (big + small) in
    done (Model { bigJug = big - (small' - small)
                , smallJug = small'
                })

  runReal :: Command Model Void -> IO (Response Model (Reference Model))
  runReal _cmd = return Done

  monitoring :: (Model, Model) -> Command Model Void -> Response Model Void
             -> Property -> Property
  monitoring (_s, s') _cmd _resp =
    counterexample $ "\n    State: " ++ show s' ++ "\n"

done :: Model -> Either void (Model, Response Model ref)
done s' | bigJug s' == 4 = return (s', BigJugIs4)
        | otherwise      = return (s', Done)

prop_dieHard :: Commands Model -> Property
prop_dieHard cmds = withMaxSuccess 10000 $ monadicIO $ do
  runCommands cmds
  assert True

When we run quickcheck prop_dieHard we get the following output:

   +++ OK, failed as expected. Assertion failed (after 199 tests and 11 shrinks):
    Commands [FillBig,BigIntoSmall,EmptySmall,BigIntoSmall,FillBig,BigIntoSmall]
    FillBig --> Done

        State: Model {bigJug = 5, smallJug = 0}

    BigIntoSmall --> Done

        State: Model {bigJug = 2, smallJug = 3}

    EmptySmall --> Done

        State: Model {bigJug = 2, smallJug = 0}

    BigIntoSmall --> Done

        State: Model {bigJug = 0, smallJug = 2}

    FillBig --> Done

        State: Model {bigJug = 5, smallJug = 2}

    BigIntoSmall --> Done

        State: Model {bigJug = 4, smallJug = 3}

    Expected: BigJugIs4
    Got: Done

Notice how the trace shows the intermediate states, making it easy to verify that it’s indeed a correct solution to the puzzle3.

Parallel property-based testing

Let’s now turn our focus to parallel property-based testing.

Debugging buggy concurrent code is not fun. The main reason for this is that the threads interleave in different ways between executions, making it hard to reproduce the bug and hard to verify that a bug fix actually worked.

Ideally we’d like to make working with concurrent code as pleasant as the sequential stateful case and without the user having to write any additional test code. In order to explain how we can achieve this, we need to first understand how we can test concurrent code in a reproducible way.

Recall our Counter that we looked at in the sequential testing case. Here we’ll be using a slight generalisation where the incr takes an integer parameter which specifies by how much we want to increment (instead of always incrementing by 1).

When we interact with the counter sequentially, i.e. one command at the time, then it appears to count correctly:

>>> incr 1
>>> incr 2
>>> get
3

If we instead concurrently issue the increments, we see something strange:

 > forM_ [0..100000] $ \i -> do
 >   c <- newCounter
 >   concurrently_ (incr c 1) (incr c 2)
 >   x <- get c
 >   if x == 3 then return () else error ("i = " ++ show i ++ ", x = " ++ show x)
 *** Exception: i = 29768, x = 1

After 29768 iterations we get back 1 rather than the expected 3! The reason for this is because there’s a race condition in the implementation of incr:

 incr i = do
   j <- readIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER
   writeIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER (i + j)

Because we first read the old value and then write the new incremented value in an non-atomic way, it’s possible that if two threads do this at the same time they overwrite each others increment. For example, consider the interleaving:

   thread 1, incr 1     |  thread 2, incr 2
   ---------------------+------------------
    0 <- readIORef      |
                        | 0 <- readIORef
                        | writeIORef (2 + 0)
    writeIORef (1 + 0)  |
                        |
                        v
                       time

If we read from the counter after the two increments are done we get 1 instead of the expected 3. The fix to this problem is to do an atomic update using atomicModifyIORef', instead of first reading and then writing to the IORef.

The concurrent test that we just wrote is not only specific to the counter example but also only uses three fixed commands, the two concurrent increments followed by a get. While it was enough to find this race condition, in general we’d like to try arbitrary combinations of commands and possibly involving more than two threads.

The key concept we need in order to accomplish that is that of concurrent history, which is perhaps easiest to explain in terms of a more familiar concept: a sequence diagram.

Consider the following sequence diagram:

Here we see that the first and second thread concurrently increment, the first thread then reads the counter concurrently with the second thread’s increment that’s still going on. The second thread’s increment finishes and a third thread does a read which is concurrent with the first thread’s read.

We can abstract away the arrows and merely focus on the intervals of the commands:

If we rotate the intervals we get the concurrent history:

Note that the execution of some commands overlap in time, this is what’s meant by concurrent and arguably it’s easier to see the overlap here than in the original sequence diagram.

We’ve also abstracted away the counter, it’s a black box from the perspective of the threads. The only thing we know for sure is when we invoked the operation and when it returned, which is what our interval captures. We also know that the effect of the operation must have happened sometime within that interval.

One such concurrent history can have different interleavings, depending on when exactly the effect of the commands happen. Here are two possible interleavings, where the red cross symbolises when the effect happened (i.e. when exactly the counter update its state).

The first corresponds to the sequential history < incr 1, get, incr 2, get >:

and the other interleaving corresponds to the sequential history < incr 1, incr 2, get, get >:

One last thing we’ve left out from the concurrent history so far is the responses. In this example, the only interesting responses are those of the gets.

Let’s say that the gets returned 1 and 3 respectively. Is this a correct concurrent outcome? Yes, according to linearisability it’s enough to find a single interleaving for which the sequential state machine model can explain the outcome and in this case the first interleaving above < incr 1, get, incr 2, get > does that.

What if the gets both returned 3? That’s also correct and witnessed by the second interleaving < incr 1, incr 2, get, get >. When we can find a sequential interleaving that supports the outcome of a concurrent execution we say that the concurrent history linearises.

If the get on the third thread returned 1 or 2 however, then it would be a non-linearisable outcome. We can see visually that that get happens after both incr, so no matter where we choose to place the red crosses on the incrs the effects will happen before that get so it must return 3. Is it even possible that 1 or 2 are returned? It’s, imagine if incr is implemented by first reading the current value then storing the incremented value, in that case there can be a race where the incrs overwrite each other.

So to summarise, we execute commands concurrently using several threads and gather a concurrent history of the execution. We then try to find a sequential interleaving (a choice of where the red crosses in the diagrams should be) which respects the a sequential state machine model specification. If we find a single one that does, then we say that the history linearises and that the concurrent execution is correct, if we cannot find a sequential interleaving that respects the model then the history doesn’t linearise and we have found a problem.

Parallel library implementation

Let’s try to implement the above. We’ll split up the implementation in three parts. First, we’ll show how to generate and shrink parallel commands, these will be different than the sequential commands as we have more than one thread that does the execution. Second, we’ll have a look at how to execute the generated parallel commands to produce a concurrent history. Finally, we’ll implement linearisability checking by trying to find an interleaving of the concurrent history which respects the sequential model.

Parallel program generation and shrinking

First we need define what a parallel program is:

newtype ParallelCommands state = ParallelCommands [Fork state]

newtype Fork state = Fork [Command state (Var (Reference state))]

The idea is that the commands inside Forks get executed in parallel, this list will only be between one and three commands long, i.e. capturing single, double or triple threaded execution. The amount of Forks themselves vary with the size of the test case, just like when we were doing the sequential testing.

Depending on the order in which the commands in the Forks get executed, we can potentially get different models. For example Fork [Write "a" "foo", Write "a" "bar"], depending on which branch of the Fork gets executed first we might end up with either "foo" or "bar" being written to "a".

Because of this, we have generalised generation and shrinking to work on a set of states rather than just a single state:

class (StateModel state, Ord state) => ParallelModel state where

  generateCommandParallel :: [state] -> Gen (Command state (Var (Reference state)))
  generateCommandParallel ss = do
    s <- elements ss
    generateCommand s

  shrinkCommandParallel :: [state] -> Command state (Var (Reference state))
                        -> [Command state (Var (Reference state))]
  shrinkCommandParallel ss cmd = shrinkCommand (maximum ss) cmd

Notice that the default implementation for generation, which should be good enough for most examples, picks an arbitrary state and reuses the generation function from the sequential case. Similar shrinking picks the biggest state (determined by the Ord instance) as the default implementation. The user is able to override these defaults, in case generation or shrinking depends on some more specific state.

We can now write a generator for parallel programs.

  arbitrary :: Gen (ParallelCommands state)
  arbitrary = ParallelCommands <$> go [initialState]
    where
      go :: [state] -> Gen [Fork state]
      go ss = sized $ \n ->
        let
          w = n `div` 2 + 1
        in
          frequency
            [ (1, return [])
            , (w, do k <- frequency [ (50, return 1) -- 50% single threaded
                                    , (30, return 2) -- 30% double threaded
                                    , (20, return 3) -- 20% triple threaded
                                    ]
                     mCmds <- vectorOf k (generateCommandParallel ss)
                                `suchThatMaybe` (parallelSafe ss . Fork)
                     case mCmds of
                       Nothing   -> return []
                       Just cmds ->
                         (Fork cmds :) <$> go (nextStates ss cmds))
            ]

Where nextStates gives all potential next states and is defined as follows.

nextStates :: (StateModel state, Ord state)
           => [state] -> [Command state (Var (Reference state))] -> [state]
nextStates ss cmds = nubOrd [ foldl' nextState s cmds | s <- ss ]

The other helper function that we need for generation is parallelSafe, which requires a bit of background.

In the sequential case a precondition is a contract that needs to be fulfilled by the client before the command is issued. In the parallel case there are multiple clients, so it could be the case that one client unknowingly breaks another clients precondition. For example Fork [Write "a" "foo", Delete "a"], where the precondition for both commands is that "a" exists. If Delete gets executed first then it would break Write’s precondition.

The solution to the precondition problem is to check that they hold in all possible interleavings of a Fork, which is what parallelSafe does:

parallelSafe :: ParallelModel state => [state] -> Fork state -> Bool
parallelSafe ss (Fork cmds0) = and
  [ preconditionsHold s cmds | s <- toList ss, cmds <- permutations cmds0 ]
  where
    preconditionsHold s0 = all (go s0) . permutations
      where
        go _s [] = True
        go  s (cmd : cmds)
          | precondition s cmd = go (nextState s cmd) cmds
          | otherwise          = False

While shrinking we also use parallelSafe:

  shrink :: ParallelCommands state -> [ParallelCommands state]
  shrink = pruneShrinks . possibleShrinks
    where
      possibleShrinks :: ParallelCommands state -> [ParallelCommands state]
      possibleShrinks
        = map (coerce . map (map fst))
        . shrinkList (shrinkList shrinker) . withParStates . unParallelCommands
        where
          withParStates :: (StateModel state, Ord state)
                        => [Fork state]
                        -> [[(Command state (Var (Reference state)), [state])]]
          withParStates = go [initialState] [] . coerce
            where
              go _ss acc []             = reverse acc
              go  ss acc (cmds : cmdss) =
                go (nextStates ss cmds) (map (\cmd -> (cmd, ss)) cmds : acc) cmdss

          shrinker :: (Command state (Var (Reference state)), [state])
                   -> [(Command state (Var (Reference state)), [state])]
          shrinker (cmd, ss) = [ (cmd', ss) | cmd' <- shrinkCommandParallel ss cmd ]

      pruneShrinks :: [ParallelCommands state] -> [ParallelCommands state]
      pruneShrinks = coerce . filter (not . null)
                   . map (go [initialState] Set.empty [] . unParallelCommands)
        where
          go :: [state] -> Set (Var (Reference state)) -> [Fork state] -> [Fork state] -> [Fork state]
          go _ss _vars acc [] = reverse acc
          go  ss  vars acc (fork@(Fork cmds) : forks)
            | all (scopeCheck vars) cmds
            , parallelSafe ss fork =
              let
                ss'   = nextStates ss cmds
                vars' = getReturnedVars (head ss) vars cmds -- NOTE: head is safe
              in
                go ss' vars' (fork : acc) forks
            | otherwise            = go ss vars acc forks

          -- It doesn't matter which of the possible states we start in, as all
          -- commands in a fork pass their preconditions in all states. It also
          -- doesn't matter in which interleaving we gather the responses, as
          -- all we do is collect the `Var`s that get returned into an unordered
          -- `Set`.
          getReturnedVars _s vars [] = vars
          getReturnedVars s vars (cmd : cmds) = case runFake cmd s of
            Left _preconditionFailed ->
              error "getReturnedVars: impossible, parallelSafe checks that all preconditions hold"
            Right (_s', resp) ->
              getReturnedVars s (vars `Set.union` Set.fromList (toList resp)) cmds

In addition we also check that shrinking doesn’t create any scoping issues, i.e. if we remove a command which creates a symbolic variable we also need to remove any fork that contains a command which uses said symbolic variable.

Another option is to skip the scope checking and instead require the user to explicitly require preconditions which ensure the scope4.

Parallel running

One final difference between the sequential and the parallel case is that because of the use of threads to achieve parallel execution, and the fact we can only spawn threads of things of type IO, we also need to be able to interpret our CommandMonad into IO, which is what runCommandMonad (which is also part of the ParallelModel type class) does.

  -- If another command monad is used we need to provide a way run it inside the
  -- IO monad. This is only needed for parallel testing, because IO is the only
  -- monad we can execute on different threads.
  runCommandMonad :: proxy state -> CommandMonad state a -> IO a

We can now implement parallel execution of commands as follows:

newtype History state = History [Event state]
deriving stock instance
   (Show (Command state (Var (Reference state))),
    Show (Response state (Reference state))) => Show (History state)

data Event state
  = Invoke Pid (Command state (Var (Reference state)))
  | Ok     Pid (Response state (Reference state))
deriving stock instance
  (Show (Command state (Var (Reference state))),
   Show (Response state (Reference state))) => Show (Event state)

newtype Pid = Pid Int
  deriving stock (Eq, Ord, Show)
  deriving newtype Enum
runParallelCommands :: forall state. ParallelModel state
                    => ParallelCommands state -> PropertyM IO ()
runParallelCommands cmds0@(ParallelCommands forks0) = do
  forM_ (parallelCommands cmds0) $ \cmd -> do
    let name = commandName cmd
    monitor (tabulate "Commands" [name] . classify True name)
  monitor (tabulate "Concurrency" (map (show . length . unFork) forks0))
  q   <- liftIO newTQueueIO
  c   <- liftIO newAtomicCounter
  env <- liftIO (runForks q c emptyEnv forks0)
  hist <- History <$> liftIO (atomically (flushTQueue q))
  let ok = linearisable env (interleavings hist)
  unless ok (monitor (counterexample (show hist)))
  assert ok
  where
    runForks :: TQueue (Event state) -> AtomicCounter -> Env state -> [Fork state]
             -> IO (Env state)
    runForks _q _c env [] = return env
    runForks  q  c env (Fork cmds : forks) = do
      envs <- liftIO $
        mapConcurrently (runParallelReal q c env) (zip [Pid 0..] cmds)
      let env' = combineEnvs (env : envs)
      runForks q c env' forks

    runParallelReal :: TQueue (Event state) -> AtomicCounter -> Env state
                    -> (Pid, Command state (Var (Reference state))) -> IO (Env state)
    runParallelReal q c env (pid, cmd) = do
      atomically (writeTQueue q (Invoke pid cmd))
      eResp <- try (runCommandMonad (Proxy :: Proxy state) (runReal (fmap (lookupEnv env) cmd)))
      case eResp of
        Left (err :: SomeException) ->
          error ("runParallelReal: " ++ displayException err)
        Right resp -> do
          -- NOTE: It's important that we extend the environment before writing `Ok`
          -- to the history, otherwise we might get scope issues.
          env' <- extendEnvParallel env c (toList resp)
          atomically (writeTQueue q (Ok pid resp))
          return env'

Extending the environment in the parallel case requires an atomic counter in order to avoid more than one thread adding the same variable:

newtype AtomicCounter = AtomicCounter (IORef Int)

newAtomicCounter :: IO AtomicCounter
newAtomicCounter = AtomicCounter <$> newIORef 0

-- Returns old value.
incrAtomicCounter :: AtomicCounter -> Int -> IO Int
incrAtomicCounter (AtomicCounter ioRef) n =
  atomicModifyIORef' ioRef (\old -> (old + n, old))

extendEnvParallel :: Env state -> AtomicCounter -> [Reference state] -> IO (Env state)
extendEnvParallel env c refs = do
  i <- incrAtomicCounter c (length refs)
  return (extendEnv env (zip [i..] refs))

combineEnvs :: [Env state] -> Env state
combineEnvs = Env . IntMap.unions . map unEnv

Hopefully the execution part is clear, next let’s have a look at how we check the result of an execution.

Linearisability checking

Recall from our parallel counter example in the introduction to parallel testing that it’s enough to find any possible interleaving which respects the sequential model. So let’s start by enumerating all possible interleavings using a Rose tree data structure:

data Op state = Op (Command state (Var (Reference state)))
                   (Response state (Reference state))

interleavings :: History state -> Forest (Op state)
interleavings (History [])  = []
interleavings (History evs0) =
  [ Node (Op cmd resp) (interleavings (History evs'))
  | (tid, cmd)   <- takeInvocations evs0
  , (resp, evs') <- findResponse tid
                      (filter1 (not . matchInvocation tid) evs0)
  ]
  where
    takeInvocations :: [Event state] -> [(Pid, Command state (Var (Reference state)))]
    takeInvocations []                         = []
    takeInvocations ((Invoke pid cmd)   : evs) = (pid, cmd) : takeInvocations evs
    takeInvocations ((Ok    _pid _resp) : _)   = []

    findResponse :: Pid -> [Event state] -> [(Response state (Reference state), [Event state])]
    findResponse _pid []                                   = []
    findResponse  pid ((Ok pid' resp) : evs) | pid == pid' = [(resp, evs)]
    findResponse  pid (ev             : evs)               =
      [ (resp, ev : evs') | (resp, evs') <- findResponse pid evs ]

    matchInvocation :: Pid -> Event state -> Bool
    matchInvocation pid (Invoke pid' _cmd) = pid == pid'
    matchInvocation _   _                  = False

    filter1 :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> [a]
    filter1 _ []                   = []
    filter1 p (x : xs) | p x       = x : filter1 p xs
                       | otherwise = xs

We can then check if there is a path through this rose tree which agrees with the sequential model:

linearisable :: forall state. StateModel state
             => Env state -> Forest (Op state) -> Bool
linearisable env = any' (go initialState)
  where
    go :: state -> Tree (Op state) -> Bool
    go s (Node (Op cmd cresp) ts) =
      case runFake cmd s of
        Left _preconditionFailure ->
          error "linearisable: impossible, all precondtions are satisifed during generation"
        Right (s', resp) ->
          cresp == fmap (lookupEnv env) resp && any' (go s') ts

    any' :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> Bool
    any' _p [] = True
    any'  p xs = any p xs

Example: parallel counter

Having defined the ParallelModel interface (which depends on the StateModel interface from the sequential testing) and programmed our parallel generation, shrinking and parallel execution and linearisability checking against this interface, we basically get parallel testing for free by reusing the sequential model.

Testing

This is the only new code we need to add to enable parallel testing of our Counter example5 from before:

instance ParallelModel Counter where

  -- The command monad is IO, so we don't need to do anything here.
  runCommandMonad _ = id

prop_parallelCounter :: ParallelCommands Counter -> Property
prop_parallelCounter cmds = monadicIO $ do
  replicateM_ 10 $ do
    run reset
    runParallelCommands cmds
  assert True

If we run the above property with runReal

  runReal Incr = Incr_ <$> incrRaceCondition

being implemented using an increment with a race condition:

incrRaceCondition :: IO ()
incrRaceCondition = do
  n <- readIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER
  writeIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER (n + 1)

then a failure is found:

 Assertion failed (after 36 tests and 1 shrink):
      ParallelCommands [Fork [Incr,Incr],Fork [Incr],Fork [Get,Get,Get],
                        Fork [Incr],Fork [Get,Get],Fork [Get,Get],
                        Fork [Incr],Fork [Get,Get,Incr],Fork [Incr],
                        Fork [Get,Get,Get],Fork [Incr,Incr],
                        Fork [Incr,Get],Fork [Incr,Incr],Fork [Get],
                        Fork [Incr]]

However, shrinking didn’t work well. The reason for this is that QuickCheck tries a smaller test case (which still has the race condition), but because of a different interleaving of threads the race doesn’t get triggered and so QuickCheck thinks it found the minimal test case (because the smaller test case, that the shrinker picked, passes).

The proper solution to this problem is to use a deterministic thread scheduler, this is what they do the parallel testing paper6. A simpler workaround is to introduce a small sleep after each read or write to shared memory, this will make it more likely that the same interleaving happens when we shrink the test:

incrRaceCondition :: IO ()
incrRaceCondition = do
  n <- readIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER
  threadDelay 100
  writeIORef gLOBAL_COUNTER (n + 1)
  threadDelay 100

With this change we get the minimal test case that triggers the race condition:

Assertion failed (after 6 tests and 4 shrinks):
      ParallelCommands [Fork [Incr,Incr],Fork [Get]]

We can avoid having to sprinkle sleeps around our interaction with shared state by creating a module with the same operations as on shared memory where the sleep is already included:

module SleepyIORef (module SleepyIORef, IORef) where

import Control.Concurrent (threadDelay)
import Data.IORef (IORef)
import qualified Data.IORef as IORef

readIORef :: IORef a -> IO a
readIORef ref = do
  threadDelay 1000
  IORef.readIORef ref

That way if we find a race, we can change the import from import Data.IORef to import SleepyIORef and rerun the tests and get better shrinking. This situation is not ideal, but save us the trouble of having to re-implement a scheduler. It’s worth stressing that the race is found in the unmodified code and the introduction of sleep is only needed to make the counterexample smaller.

Example: process registry

For a slightly more complicated example containing race conditions, let’s have a look at an implementation of the Erlang process registry7.

Software under test

The idea behind Erlang’s process registry is that you can spawn threads, register the ThreadId to some name of type string, and then lookup the thread by name rather than its thread id. Threads can also be unregistered and killed.

This is useful if threads die and get restarted and register the same name, then other threads can easily find the thread id of the new thread using the registry.

{-# NOINLINE registry #-}
registry :: IORef [(String,ThreadId)]
registry = unsafePerformIO (newIORef [])

alive :: ThreadId -> IO Bool
alive tid = do
  s <- threadStatus tid
  return $ s /= ThreadFinished && s /= ThreadDied

spawn :: IO ThreadId
spawn = forkIO (threadDelay 100000000)

whereis :: String -> IO (Maybe ThreadId)
whereis name = do
  reg <- readRegistry
  return $ lookup name reg

register :: String -> ThreadId -> IO ()
register name tid = do
  ok <- alive tid
  reg <- readRegistry
  if ok && name `notElem` map fst reg && tid `notElem` map snd reg
    then do
      atomicModifyIORef registry $ \reg' ->
           if name `notElem` map fst reg' && tid `notElem` map snd reg'
             then ((name,tid):reg',())
             else (reg',badarg)
    else badarg

unregister :: String -> IO ()
unregister name = do
  reg <- readRegistry
  if name `elem` map fst reg
    then atomicModifyIORef registry $ \reg' ->
           (filter ((/=name).fst) reg',
            ())
    else badarg

readRegistry :: IO [(String, ThreadId)]
readRegistry = do
  reg <- readIORef registry
  garbage <- filterM (fmap not.alive) (map snd reg)
  atomicModifyIORef' registry $ \reg' ->
    let reg'' = filter ((`notElem` garbage).snd) reg' in (reg'',reg'')

badarg :: a
badarg = error "bad argument"

kill :: ThreadId -> IO ()
kill tid = do
  killThread tid
  waitUntilDead 1000
  where
    waitUntilDead :: Int -> IO ()
    waitUntilDead 0 = error "kill: thread didn't die"
    waitUntilDead n = do
      b <- alive tid
      if b
      then do
        threadDelay 1000
        waitUntilDead (n - 1)
      else return ()
Model

The model of the process registry contains three things that we haven’t seen before. The first thing to note is that Register and Unregister might fail, so we use an Either ErrorCall in their respective responses and a function called abstractError to make the error from the model and the error from the real implementation match up. It’s called abstract, because it abstracts away details from the real implementation, and it’s a useful technique to know as it can be applied to other settings.

The second thing to notice is the use of monitoring to keep statistics of how often Register and Unregister actually do fail, this is useful coverage information that ensures that our generators and or pre-conditions are not too restrictive.

data RegState = RegState
  { tids   :: [Var ThreadId]
  , regs   :: [(String, Var (ThreadId))]
  , killed :: [Var ThreadId]
  }
  deriving (Eq, Ord, Show)

instance StateModel RegState where

  initialState :: RegState
  initialState = RegState [] [] []

  type Reference RegState = ThreadId

  data Command RegState tid
    = Spawn
    | WhereIs String
    | Register String tid
    | Unregister String
    | Kill tid
    deriving (Show, Functor, Foldable)

  data Response RegState tid
    = Spawn_ tid
    | WhereIs_ (NonFoldable (Maybe tid))
    | Register_ (Either ErrorCall ())
    | Unregister_ (Either ErrorCall ())
    | Kill_ ()
    deriving (Eq, Show, Functor, Foldable)

  generateCommand :: RegState -> Gen (Command RegState (Var ThreadId))
  generateCommand s = oneof $
    [ return Spawn ] ++
    [ Register <$> arbitraryName <*> elements (tids s) | not (null (tids s)) ] ++
    [ Unregister <$> arbitraryName
    , WhereIs <$> arbitraryName
    ] ++
    [ Kill <$> elements (tids s) | not (null (tids s)) ]
    where
      arbitraryName :: Gen String
      arbitraryName = elements allNames

  runFake :: Command RegState (Var ThreadId)-> RegState
          -> Either void (RegState, Response RegState (Var ThreadId))
  runFake Spawn               s = let tid = Var (length (tids s)) in
                                  return (s { tids = tids s ++ [tid] }, Spawn_ tid)
  runFake (WhereIs name)      s = return (s, WhereIs_ (NonFoldable (lookup name (regs s))))
  runFake (Register name tid) s
    | tid `elem` tids s
    , name `notElem` map fst (regs s)
    , tid `notElem` map snd (regs s)
    , tid `notElem` killed s
    = return (s { regs = (name, tid) : regs s }, Register_ (Right ()))

    | otherwise
    = return (s, Register_ (Left (ErrorCall "bad argument")))

  runFake (Unregister name)   s
    | name `elem` map fst (regs s) =
        return (s { regs = remove name (regs s) }, Unregister_ (Right ()))
    | otherwise = return (s, Unregister_ (Left (ErrorCall "bad argument")))
    where
      remove x = filter ((/= x) . fst)
  runFake (Kill tid) s = return (s { killed = tid : killed s
                                   , regs   = remove tid (regs s)}, Kill_ ())
    where
      remove x = filter ((/= x) . snd)

  runReal :: Command RegState ThreadId -> IO (Response RegState ThreadId)
  runReal Spawn               = Spawn_      <$> spawn
  runReal (WhereIs name)      = WhereIs_ . NonFoldable <$> whereis name
  runReal (Register name tid) = Register_   <$> fmap (left abstractError) (try (register name tid))
  runReal (Unregister name)   = Unregister_ <$> fmap (left abstractError) (try (unregister name))
  runReal (Kill tid)          = Kill_       <$> kill tid

  monitoring :: (RegState, RegState) -> Command RegState ThreadId
             -> Response RegState ThreadId -> Property -> Property
  monitoring (_s, s') cmd resp =
    let
      aux tag = classify True (show tag)
              . counterexample ("\n    State: " ++ show s' ++ "\n")
    in
      case (cmd, resp) of
        (Register   {}, Register_   (Left _))  -> aux RegisterFailed
        (Register   {}, Register_   (Right _)) -> aux RegisterSucceeded
        (Unregister {}, Unregister_ (Left _))  -> aux UnregisterFailed
        (Unregister {}, Unregister_ (Right _)) -> aux UnregisterSucceeded
        _otherwise -> counterexample $ "\n    State: " ++ show s' ++ "\n"

-- Throws away the location information from the error, so that it matches up
-- with the fake.
abstractError :: ErrorCall -> ErrorCall
abstractError (ErrorCallWithLocation msg _loc) = ErrorCall msg

allNames :: [String]
allNames = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]

data Tag = RegisterFailed | RegisterSucceeded | UnregisterFailed | UnregisterSucceeded
  deriving Show

The last new thing to note here is that WhereIs_ returns the thread id that we wanted to look up, but thread ids also happen to be references. The way we implemented extending the environment with new references is that we call Data.Foldable.toList on all responses, which gives us all references from the responses. In the Spawn_ case this does the right thing, since spawn returns a reference to the newly spawned thread id, but in this case the thread id from WhereIs_ is not a new reference (it’s merely a reference to the thread id we wanted to look up), so we shouldn’t extend the environment with the reference that WhereIs_ returns. We solve this problem with wrapping the response of WhereIs_ in NonFoldable which has a toList which doesn’t return anything.

newtype NonFoldable a = NonFoldable a
  deriving stock (Eq, Show)

instance Functor NonFoldable where
  fmap f (NonFoldable x) = NonFoldable (f x)

instance Foldable NonFoldable where
  foldMap _f (NonFoldable _x) = mempty
Testing

We can now write our sequential testing property as we’ve done earlier for the other examples.

prop_registry :: Commands RegState -> Property
prop_registry cmds = monadicIO $ do
  void (run cleanUp)
  runCommands cmds
  assert True

cleanUp :: IO [Either ErrorCall ()]
cleanUp = sequence
  [ try (unregister name) :: IO (Either ErrorCall ())
  | name <- allNames
  ]

This property passes and we can see, thanks to our monitoring, that we got good coverage of failing commands as well:

  +++ OK, passed 100 tests:
  83% Spawn
  82% WhereIs
  79% Unregister
  78% UnregisterFailed
  70% Kill
  70% Register
  62% RegisterFailed
  59% RegisterSucceeded
  29% UnregisterSucceeded

To make sure everything works as expected, let’s introduce a bug on purpose:

  register :: String -> ThreadId -> IO ()
  register name tid = do
    ok <- alive tid
    reg <- readRegistry
    if ok && name `notElem` map fst reg && tid `notElem` map snd reg
      then atomicModifyIORef' registry $ \reg' ->
             if name `notElem` map fst reg' && tid `notElem` map snd reg'
-              then ((name,tid):reg',())
+              then ([(name,tid)],())
               else (reg',badarg)
      else badarg

If we rerun the tests with this bug in place, we get test failures like the following:

     *** Failed! Assertion failed (after 30 tests and 7 shrinks):
      Commands {unCommands = [Spawn,Spawn,Register "e" (Var 1),Register "d" (Var 0),Unregister "e"]}
      Spawn --> Spawn_ (ThreadId 154)

          State: RegState {tids = [Var 0], regs = [], killed = []}

      Spawn --> Spawn_ (ThreadId 155)

          State: RegState {tids = [Var 0,Var 1], regs = [], killed = []}

      Register "e" (Var 1) --> Register_ (Right ())

          State: RegState {tids = [Var 0,Var 1], regs = [("e",Var 1)], killed = []}

      Register "d" (Var 0) --> Register_ (Right ())

          State: RegState {tids = [Var 0,Var 1], regs = [("d",Var 0),("e",Var 1)], killed = []}

      Unregister "e" --> Unregister_ (Left bad argument)

          State: RegState {tids = [Var 0,Var 1], regs = [("d",Var 0)], killed = []}

      Expected: Unregister_ (Right ())
      Got: Unregister_ (Left bad argument)

As we can see, unregister fails when it in fact should succeed. We’ve registered "e" so we should be allowed to unregister it, but the real implementation has, due to the bug, forgot that the registration happened.

Let’s move on to the parallel tests, all we need to add is:

instance ParallelModel RegState where
  runCommandMonad _ = id

prop_parallelRegistry :: ParallelCommands RegState -> Property
prop_parallelRegistry cmds = monadicIO $ do
  replicateM_ 10 $ do
    void (run cleanUp)
    runParallelCommands cmds
  assert True

When we run the tests we get rather long counterexamples:

      *** Failed! (after 24 tests and 7 shrinks):
      Exception:
        bad argument
        CallStack (from HasCallStack):
          error, called at src/Example/Registry/Real.hs:69:10 in stateful-pbt-with-fakes-0.0.0-inplace:Example.Registry.Real
      ParallelCommands [Fork [Spawn,WhereIs "a"],Fork [Spawn],
                        Fork [Register "c" (Var 1),Spawn],Fork [Register "e" (Var 2),Register "a" (Var 2)]]

If we replace our shared memory operations with version that do a bit of sleep beforehand:

- import Data.IORef
+ import SleepyIORef

We get better shrinking results:

      *** Failed! (after 5 tests and 5 shrinks):
      Exception:
        bad argument
        CallStack (from HasCallStack):
          error, called at src/Example/Registry/Real.hs:69:10 in stateful-pbt-with-fakes-0.0.0-inplace:Example.Registry.Real
      ParallelCommands [Fork [Spawn],Fork [Register "b" (Var 0),Register "c" (Var 0)]]

Here we see clearly that there’s some problem in Register, as that’s the only thing that happens in parallel. If we look at the implementation of register it’s obvious where the race condition is, for example we are using atomicModifyIORef to update the registry. The problem is that we call readRegistry to check if a name has already been registered and then call atomicModifyIORef, so the race can be if another thread sneaks in between those two calls.

We can fix this problem by adding a global lock around register:

{-# NOINLINE lock #-}
lock :: MVar ()
lock = unsafePerformIO (newMVar ())

registerNoRace :: String -> ThreadId -> IO ()
registerNoRace name tid = withMVar lock $ \_ -> register name tid

When rerunning the tests with this fixed version of registry, we get:

      *** Failed! Assertion failed (after 30 tests and 13 shrinks):
      ParallelCommands [Fork [Spawn],Fork [Spawn],Fork [Spawn],
                        Fork [Register "d" (Var 2)],Fork [Unregister "d",Unregister "d"]]

Which seems to suggest that we have a similar problem with unregister, which is indeed the case. After applying the same fix to unregister, we get:

      *** Failed! Assertion failed (after 15 tests and 4 shrinks):
      ParallelCommands [Fork [Spawn],Fork [Register "d" (Var 0)],
                        Fork [Kill (Var 0),Register "e" (Var 0)]]

Killing a thread will unregister it, so we get a similar problem again. If we take the lock before calling kill, then the parallel tests finally pass.

These race conditions are essentially variants on the parallel counter bug, but I hope you agree that they’re not as obvious in the process registry case. I also hope that by now it’s clear that as a user we get these parallel tests basically without doing any extra work. All the heavy lifting is done by the library by reusing the sequential model, and this code can be written once and then reused for all our parallel testing examples!

Integration testing with contract tested fakes

Throughout this post we’ve used in-memory models, or fakes, as reference implementations to test against. The use of fakes diverges from the original work on Quviq’s Erlang QuickCheck, where a more traditional state machine specification is used with post-conditions.

As far as I know, Edsko de Vries’ post (2019) was the first to propose the use of fakes instead of state machine specifications with post-conditions. Edsko also showed how one can implement fake-based specifications on top of a library that uses state machine specifications8.

Using fakes instead of state machine specifications with post-conditions is easier for programmers unfamiliar with formal specifications, because most programmers are already familiar with mocks and fakes are similar to mocks.

There are other advantages to using fakes, for example we can use this fake in integration tests with components that depend on the software that we tested with the fake.

Imagine a situation where we have two components with the first depending on the second:

   +--------+              +---------+
   |        |  depends on  |         |
   | Real A +------------->|  Real B |
   |        |              |         |
   +--------+              +---------+

If we want to integration test component \(A\) and \(B\) then we first need to start or enable component \(B\) and then start testing component \(A\). In a larger system there can be many dependencies and integration tests can get slow and flaky due to the infrastructure for starting up the dependencies.

With fakes we can get fast and deterministic integration tests by depending on the fake of the dependency instead of the real dependency:

   +--------+              +---------+
   |        |  depends on  |         |
   | Real A +------------->|  Fake B |
   |        |              |         |
   +--------+              +---------+

One of the problems with integration testing against fakes is that the fake can be wrong. The standard solution to solve that problem is to contract test the fake to make sure that it is faithful to the software it’s supposed to be a fake of. We don’t have this problem, because our stateful and parallel property-based tests assure that the fake is faithful:

   +--------+                  +---------+
   |        |  tested against  |         |
   | Real B +----------------->|  Fake B |
   |        | (contract test)  |         |
   +--------+                  +---------+

In this, final, section we’ll look at examples of how integration testing against fakes works. Hopefully this shows how the testing methodology that we’ve explored in this post can be scaled to a bigger system of components.

Example: queue (again)

As our first example of integration testing, let’s recall our queue example from the section on stateful testing. We can introduce an interface for it as follows:

data IQueue q = IQueue
  { iNew  :: Int -> IO q
  , iPut  :: q -> Int -> IO ()
  , iGet  :: q -> IO Int
  , iSize :: q -> IO Int
  }

The real implementation can instantiate this interface in a straightforward way:

real :: IQueue Queue
real = IQueue
  { iNew  = new
  , iPut  = put
  , iGet  = get
  , iSize = size
  }

The interesting part is that our fake can also instantiate the same interface by storing the state in a mutable reference (IORef) as follows.

fake :: IO (IQueue (Var Queue))
fake = do
  ref <- newIORef emptyState
  return IQueue
    { iNew  = \n   -> updateIORef ref (fNew n)
    , iPut  = \q i -> updateIORef ref (fPut q i)
    , iGet  = \q   -> updateIORef ref (fGet q)
    , iSize = \q   -> updateIORef ref (fSize q)
    }
  where
    updateIORef :: IORef State -> FakeOp a -> IO a
    updateIORef ref op =
      atomicModifyIORef' ref (\fs -> assoc fs (op fs)) >>= \case
        Left err -> throwIO err
        Right x  -> return x
      where
        assoc fs  (Left err)       = (fs,  Left err)
        assoc _fs (Right (fs', x)) = (fs', Right x)

We can now write components or services against this interface:

prog :: IQueue q -> IO ()
prog iq = do
  q <- iNew iq 3
  iPut iq q 0
  iPut iq q 1
  iPut iq q 2
  x <- iGet iq q
  assert (x == 0) (return ())
  sz <- iSize iq q
  assert (sz == 2) (return ())

test :: IO ()
test = prog =<< fake

deploy :: IO ()
deploy = prog real

When we integration test our new component we can use the fake instance to make the tests fast and deterministic, while when we deploy we use the real instance and because of our stateful property-based tests we know that the fake is faithful to the real implementation.

Example: file system

The next example is a file system, first used by Edsko in the post that also introduced using fakes as models.

The interface is parametrised by a file handle. We can create directories, open files to get a hold of a file handle, file handles can then be read from and written to, and finally closed:

data IFileSystem h = IFileSystem
  { iMkDir :: Dir -> IO ()
  , iOpen  :: File -> IO h
  , iWrite :: h -> String -> IO ()
  , iClose :: h -> IO ()
  , iRead  :: File -> IO String
  }

The real implementation of this interface uses the real file system. In order to isolate the tests all operations will be relative to some root directory:

root :: FilePath
root = "/tmp/qc-test"

rMkDir :: Dir -> IO ()
rMkDir d = createDirectory (dirFP root d)

rOpen :: File -> IO Handle
rOpen f = openFile (fileFP root f) AppendMode

rWrite :: Handle -> String -> IO ()
rWrite h s = hPutStr h s

rClose :: Handle -> IO ()
rClose h = hClose h

rRead :: File -> IO String
rRead f = readFile (fileFP root f)
real :: IFileSystem Handle
real = IFileSystem
  { iMkDir = rMkDir
  , iOpen  = rOpen
  , iWrite = rWrite
  , iClose = rClose
  , iRead  = rRead
  }

The fake implementation of the interface is, as usual, implemented using an in-memory data structure:

type FHandle = Var Handle

data FakeFS = F {
    dirs  :: Set Dir
  , files :: Map File String
  , open  :: Map FHandle File
  , next  :: FHandle
  }
  deriving Show

emptyFakeFS :: FakeFS
emptyFakeFS = F (Set.singleton (Dir [])) Map.empty Map.empty (Var 0)

type FakeOp a = FakeFS -> (Either PrecondFail a, FakeFS)

fMkDir :: Dir -> FakeOp ()
fMkDir d m@(F ds fs hs n)
  | d        `Set.member`    ds = (Left AlreadyExists, m)
  | parent d `Set.notMember` ds = (Left DoesNotExist, m)
  | otherwise                   = (Right (), F (Set.insert d ds) fs hs n)

fOpen :: File -> FakeOp FHandle
fOpen f m@(F ds fs hs n@(Var n_))
  | alreadyOpen   = (Left Busy, m)
  | not dirExists = (Left DoesNotExist, m)
  | fileExists    = (Right n, F ds fs hs' n')
  | otherwise     = (Right n, F ds (Map.insert f "" fs) hs' n')
  where
    hs' = Map.insert n f hs
    n'  = Var (succ n_)

    fileExists  =         f `Map.member` fs
    dirExists   = fileDir f `Set.member` ds
    alreadyOpen = f `List.elem` Map.elems hs

fWrite :: FHandle -> String -> FakeOp ()
fWrite h s m@(F ds fs hs n)
  | Just f <- Map.lookup h hs = (Right (), F ds (Map.adjust (++ s) f fs) hs n)
  | otherwise                 = (Left HandleClosed, m)

fClose :: FHandle -> FakeOp ()
fClose h (F ds fs hs n) = (Right (), F ds fs (Map.delete h hs) n)

fRead :: File -> FakeOp String
fRead f m@(F _ fs hs _)
  | alreadyOpen               = (Left Busy         , m)
  | Just s <- Map.lookup f fs = (Right s           , m)
  | otherwise                 = (Left DoesNotExist , m)
  where
    alreadyOpen = f `List.elem` Map.elems hs
fake :: IO (IFileSystem FHandle)
fake = do
  ref <- newIORef emptyFakeFS
  return IFileSystem
    { iMkDir = \d   -> updateIORef ref (fMkDir d)
    , iOpen  = \f   -> updateIORef ref (fOpen f)
    , iWrite = \h s -> updateIORef ref (fWrite h s)
    , iClose = \h   -> updateIORef ref (fClose h)
    , iRead  = \f   -> updateIORef ref (fRead f)
    }
  where
    updateIORef :: IORef FakeFS -> FakeOp a -> IO a
    updateIORef ref op =
      atomicModifyIORef' ref (\fs -> swap (op fs)) >>= \case
        Left err -> throwIO err
        Right x  -> return x
      where
        swap (x, y) = (y, x)

Assuming we’ve tested that the fake file system is faithful to the real one, we can depend on the interface in all components of our system that need the file system:

prog :: IFileSystem h -> IO ()
prog ifs = do
  let d = Dir ["foo"]
  iMkDir ifs d
  let f = File d "bar"
  h <- iOpen ifs f
  iWrite ifs h "baz"
  iClose ifs h
  putStrLn =<< iRead ifs f

We can then use the fake file system when we integration test and thus get fast and deterministic tests, and then use the real file system when we deploy.

test :: IO ()
test = prog =<< fake

deploy :: IO ()
deploy = prog real

Because of the fact that we know that the fake is faithful to the real file system implementation, we can be relatively sure that swapping in the real file system instead of the fake one when deploying will not introduce bugs. If it does introduce a bug then we have a mismatch between the fake and the real implementation and we need to investigate how it slipped through our stateful property-based tests.

Note that prog is just a silly example, in a real system the component that uses the file system can be more complex, for example in the system that Edsko worked on the component that depended on the file system is a database. In such cases it makes sense to write a whole new stateful and parallel property-based test suite using database commands and responses, it’s those tests that do the integration testing between the database and the fake file system, while the stateful and parallel property-based tests of the file system alone do the contract tests that ensure that the file system fake is faithful to the real file system. The picture looks like this, where “DB” is the database and “FS” is the file system:

   +---------+              +----------+
   |         |  depends on  |          |
   | Real DB +------------->|  Fake FS |
   |         |              |          |
   +----+----+              +----------+
        |
        | tested against
        v
   +---------+
   |         |
   | Fake DB |
   |         |
   +---------+

Example: bigger system of components

The examples given above, a queue and a file system, might not seems necessary to fake9 so to finish of let’s sketch how the same technique scales to a bigger system of components or services.

Imagine we have three components or services, where component A depends on component B which depends on component C:

  +---+      +---+      +---+
  |   |      |   |      |   |
  | A +----->| B +----->| C |
  |   |      |   |      |   |
  +---+      +---+      +---+

Following the pattern that we did for the queue and file system example, we’d define three interfaces:

data IA = ...
data IB = ...
data IC = ...

And the dependencies are made clear when we instantiate the interfaces:

iC :: IO IC       -- C has no dependencies.
iB :: IC -> IO IB -- B depends on C.
iA :: IB -> IO IA -- A depends on B.

The testing strategy is then as follows:

  1. Stateful and parallel test C, this gives us a fake of C which is contract tested;
  2. Use C fake when integration testing B;
  3. Use B fake (which uses the C fake) when testing A.

Hopefully it should be clear that this strategy scales to more components or services10.

Conclusion and future work

We’ve seen how stateful and parallel property-based testing can be implemented in about 400 lines of code, which is comparable to the 300 lines of code of the first version of QuickCheck (which didn’t have shrinking). We’ve also had a look at several examples of how we can use fakes as models and how to test bigger systems in a compositional manner by reusing the fakes.

I hope that this is enough material to get people curious and experimenting in their favorite programming languages11. Feel free to get in touch or open an issue in case there’s anything I can help with. Who knows, together, we might even be able to slightly improve the state of property-based testing libraries!

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Daniel Gustafsson for helping implement the quickcheck-state-machine library with me seven years ago, discussing a fix for parallel commands generation issue that I found while writing this post, and for proofreading.

I also want to thank Larry Diehl for proofreading and making several suggestions on how to improve the text and make it more readable.

Discussions and follow-ups

The post generated comments in various places:

It also seem to have inspired some follow-up posts:


  1. Is there a source for this story? I can’t remember where I’ve heard it. This short biography gives some of the details:

    “From 2002-2005 he led a major research project in software verification, funded by the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation. This led to the development of Quviq QuickCheck in Erlang.”

    I believe this must be the project mentioned above.↩︎

  2. There’s some room for error here from the users side, e.g. the user could create non-unique references. In a proper library one might want to introduce a genSym construct which guarantees uniqueness.↩︎

  3. So stateful property-based testing with a trivial runReal can be seen as crude version of a random path exploring “model checker”. One could perhaps implement something closer to TLC (the model checker for TLA+), which enumerates all paths up to some depth, by using smallcheck rather than QuickCheck. If this topic interests you, you might also want to have a look at Gabriella Gonzalez’s HasCal.

    I don’t have an example for this, but I guess one can also think of stateful property-based testing with a trivial runFake as a crude version of a fuzzer (without coverage guidance). For more on this and how to add coverage guidance, see Coverage guided, property based testing (2019).↩︎

  4. Another idea might be to drop all preconditions in the parallel case and make all commands be able to fail gracefully instead of crashing, e.g. Write_ (Either DoesntExist ()).

    The problem with this approach is that some examples, such as the ticket dispenser, have initialisation commands such as New which create a ticket dispenser reference upon which the later commands depend on, so without preconditions forbidding more than one New we can end up generating: Fork [New, New], which doesn’t make sense. It should also be noted that making New fail gracefully when a New has already been executed would need a global boolean flag, which is ugly.↩︎

  5. The parallel counter example is similar to the ticket dispenser example that appears in John’s paper Testing the hard stuff and staying sane (2014).↩︎

  6. For how to implement a deterministic scheduler, see matklad’s post. I’ve also started porting his ideas to Haskell over here.↩︎

  7. The sequential variant of the process registry example first appeared in the paper QuickCheck testing for fun and profit (2007) and is also part of John’s Midlands Graduate School course (2019). The parallel tests were introduced in Finding Race Conditions in Erlang with QuickCheck and PULSE (2009).↩︎

  8. I believe the post-condition formulation is more general, as it allows a relational rather than a functional specification. So I don’t think we can show the converse of what Edsko did, i.e. implement a post-condition style specification on top of our fake-based one.↩︎

  9. Unless we want to test what happens when failures, such as the disk being full etc. Research shows that “almost all (92%) of the catastrophic system failures are the result of incorrect handling of non-fatal errors explicitly signaled in software. […] in 58% of the catastrophic failures, the underlying faults could easily have been detected through simple testing of error handling code.”. Fakes make it easier to inject faults, but that’s a story for another day.↩︎

  10. See the talk Integrated Tests Are A Scam by J.B. Rainsberger for a longer presentation of this idea.↩︎

  11. In the unlikely case that there’s someone out there who wants to dig even deeper into this topic, then I’ve compiled a list of ideas for improvements and further exploration.↩︎