Subject: SEN1 Meeting tomorrow: Anya Bagge
From: Bas Basten
To: sen1-list 
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:24:12 +0100 (CET)

Hi all,

At tomorrow's SEN1 meeting Anya will talk about the latest research
project she did with her colleagues from Bergen:

Concepts & Axiom-Based Testing
-----------------------------------------
A.H. Bagge (with V. David & M. Haveraaen)

Traditional unit tests are case-based, checking a likely error scenario 
or an error that has previously been identified and fixed.  Coming up 
with good test cases is challenging, particularly when testing generic 
code, and focusing on individual tests can distract from creating tests 
that cover the full functionality.

_Concepts_ provide a generic way of describing code interfaces for 
generic code. Together with _axioms_, program behaviour can be
specified 
algebraically in a formal or semi-formal way.

We have made a library to support programming with concepts and axioms 
in standard C++ 2011, which can generate generic unit tests, by
treating 
the axioms as code to be evaluated with automatically generated test 
data. Everything happens within standard C++, no extra tools necessary.

While I will talk about C++ here, the same technique can be applied
(and 
already has been applied, several times) to other languages as well, 
including Java. We also have a tool for that, JAxT, but I'm not so 
familiar with it, so I won't get too much into that.
-----------------------------------------

We start at 10am in room L016. See you all there!

Cheers,
Bas