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