Advanced management of data integrity: property-based testing for business rules

摘要

Software testing is a very delicate aspect of software development, since designing good test sets is a non-trivial task. In this article, we describe a testing technique for testing business rules using property-based testing and the property-based automatic testing tool QuickCheck. Systematic, effective, and efficient testing of business rules increases the confidence on the validation of business concepts and domain rules which are specifically critical to data consistency. The approach is presented on the basis of small but representative examples in order to facilitate the readers’ understanding, but it has been successfully evaluated in a number of different industrial examples, demonstrating that it generalises to much larger systems and is, thus, broadly applicable.