On 11/22/11 6:09 AM, Macías López wrote:
Hello:
I'm a Master's student in Computer Science. I have to make a project
involving some research, I'm very interested in Quickcheck and I wonder if
there are some areas which need work or if there is some potential research
topic related to it.
In particular I know that Erlang Quickcheck has been worked on a lot and
has some features like state machines or C bindings which may be useful to
the Haskell community.
I would appreciate any directions.
Something I think would be nice is to see full integration between
SmallCheck and QuickCheck. In particular, I'd like to use SmallCheck to
exhaustively search the small cases, and then use QuickCheck in a way
that ensures that it only tests on things larger than the ones which
have already been tested.
One of the problems with mixing the two these days is that QuickCheck
often wastes a lot of time checking things that SmallCheck will also
test. While the goal may not seem very researchy, it actually gets at
one of the main weaknesses of QuickCheck: namely, how to properly
control generation of arbitrary values in order to ensure you're testing
something helpful. It's too easy to design Arbitrary instances which
only generate small values (e.g., half of all lists are the empty list)
or which loop forever (because of trying to avoid the too-small
problem), which makes me think that Arbitrary isn't the right set of
abstractions for controlling coverage of the value space.
I haven't followed the Erlang line of QC, so I'm not sure if they've
made progress on this issue or not.
--
Live well,
~wren
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