Property-based Testing of Attribute Grammars

Abstract

Software testing is an integral part of modern software development. Testing frameworks are part of the toolset of any software language allowing programmers to test their programs in order to detect bugs. Unfortunately, there is no work on testing in attribute grammars.

In this paper we combine the powerful property-based testing technique with the attribute grammar formalism. In such property-based attribute grammars, properties are defined on attribute instances. Properties are tested on large sets of randomly generated (abstract syntax) trees by evaluating their attributes.

We present an implementation that relies on strategies to express property-based attribute grammars. Strategies are tree-based recursion patterns that are used to encode logic quantifiers defining the properties.