Lambda the Ultimate

Parameterized unit tests extend the current industry practice of using closed unit tests defined as parameterless methods. Parameterized unit tests separate two concerns: 1) They specify the external behavior of the involved methods for all possible test arguments. 2) Test cases can be re-obtained as traditional closed unit tests by instantiating the parameterized unit tests. Symbolic execution and constraint solving can be used to automatically choose a minimal set of inputs that exercise a parameterized unit test with respect to possible code paths of the implementation. In addition, parameterized unit tests can be used as symbolic summaries which allows symbolic execution to scale for arbitrary abstraction levels. We have developed a prototype tool which computes test cases from parameterized unit tests; it is integrated into the forthcoming Visual Studio Team System product. We report on its first use to test parts of the .NET base class library.

By adding parameters the authors turn a closed unit test into a universally quantified conditional axiom that must hold for all inputs under specified assumptions. Adding parameters improves the expressiveness of unit cases, at the expense of not providing concrete test cases. Symbolic execution is used to automatically find the set of parameters that have to be tested.

This seems like an interesting approach to unifying unit testing and algebraic specifications.