SmartCheck: Automatic and Efficient Counterexample Reduction and Generalization

• ABSTRACT:
  
  QuickCheck is a powerful library for automatic test-case generation. Because QuickCheck performs random testing, some of the counterexamples discovered are very large. QuickCheck provides an interface for the user to write shrink functions to attempt to reduce the size of counterexamples. Hand-written implementations of shrink can be complex, inefficient, and consist of significant boilerplate code. Furthermore, shrinking is only one aspect in debugging: counterexample generalization is the process of extrapolating from individual counterexamples to a class of counterexamples, often requiring a flash of insight from the programmer. To improve counterexample reduction and generalization, we introduce SmartCheck. SmartCheck is a debugging tool that reduces algebraic data using generic search heuristics to efficiently find smaller counterexamples. In addition to shrinking, SmartCheck also automatically generalizes counterexamples to formulas representing classes of counterexamples. SmartCheck has been implemented for Haskell and is freely available.

• BIBTEX:
  

  @inproceedings{smartcheck,
    author    = {Lee Pike},
    title     = {{SmartCheck}: Automatic and Efficient Counterexample Reduction and Generalization},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the Haskell Symposium},
    publisher = {ACM},
    year      = {2014},
    note =      {Available at \url{https://leepike.github.io/pub_pages/smartcheck.html}}}

• PAPER DOWNLOAD: smartcheck.pdf