Editing Software testing (section)

=== Property testing ===
{{distinguish|property testing{{!}}property testing algorithms}}

Property testing is a testing technique where, instead of asserting that specific inputs produce specific expected outputs, the practitioner randomly generates many inputs, runs the program on all of them, and asserts the truth of some "property" that should be true for every pair of input and output. For example, every output from a serialization function should be accepted by the corresponding deserialization function, and every output from a sort function should be a monotonically increasing list containing exactly the same elements as its input.

Property testing libraries allow the user to control the strategy by which random inputs are constructed, to ensure coverage of degenerate cases, or inputs featuring specific patterns that are needed to fully exercise aspects of the implementation under test.

Property testing is also sometimes known as "generative testing" or "QuickCheck testing" since it was introduced and popularized by the Haskell library [[QuickCheck]].<ref>{{Cite book |chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/351240.351266 |series=Icfp '00 |pages=268–279 |doi=10.1145/351240.351266 |isbn=978-1-58113-202-1 |s2cid=5668071 |chapter=QuickCheck |title=Proceedings of the fifth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming |date=2000 |last1=Claessen |first1=Koen |last2=Hughes |first2=John }}</ref>