Re:Why frozen test fixtures are a problem on large projects ...
by dkarl on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @10:33AM
(#46206032)
You should see if your language has a property-based testing library; it'll have a ton of useful functionality to help with what you're already doing!
A clarification on terminology, the "property" in "property-based testing" refers to properties that code under test is supposed to obey. For example, in the author's Example 2, the collection being sorted is the property that the test is checking.
Re:Why frozen test fixtures are a problem on large projects ...
by FuckButtons on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @10:22AM
(#46205875)
Forgive me if I’m just reading this incorrectly, but that doesn’t sound exactly like property testing as I’ve done it. the libraries implement an algorithm for narrowing down to the simplest reproducer for a given failure mode, so all of the inputs to a test that are randomized are provided by the library.
My rule was to randomize every property by default. The test needs to specify which property needs to have a certain value. E.g. set the address if you're testing something about the address.
So it was immediately obvious which properties a test relied on.