Model-based testing of data types with side effects

Abstract

Data types are the core of many applications, and libraries offering implementations of data types should better be solid and well tested. Testing purely functional data types with QuickCheck provides a complete test method for data types, but establishing a complete test method for data types with side-effects is still an open issue. In this paper we show how we can use a stateful QuickCheck model to establish a complete test method for any data type. Considering side effects allows us to move from the purely functional world to the imperative world, as needed to face the testing of data types implementations in languages such as C. We therefore applied our method to some of the data types provided by the well-known GNOME Glib library.