PLClub Discussion Group

Algebraic Combinatorial Testing

For PL Club this week, I will be talking about algebraic combinatorial testing.

Combinatorial testing is a powerful and widely studied testing methodology. Its key concept is combinatorial coverage, which measures the degree to which a given set of tests exercises every possible choice of values for every small combination of inputs. But, in its usual form, this metric only applies to programs whose inputs have a very constrained shape: essentially, a Cartesian product of finite sets.

Recently I have been working on generalizing combinatorial coverage to the richer world of algebraic data types by formalizing a class of sparse test descriptions based on regular tree expressions. I will be talking about that work, and I hope to get some feedback from the group.