The generative generation

Testing in Clojure has become an interesting and controversial topic. As with most programming languages, quite a few options have sprung up around testing over the years. Most recently, a library called test.generative has quietly made its way into the Clojure world.

Inspired from ideas out of Haskell's quick check and other similar libraries, test.generative is a very different approach to testing that involves describing the inputs and outputs of your system via functions and letting the test framework generate possible scenarios. When done properly, this method of testing can produce far more test cases than any sane human would want to write and maintain. Like other benefits and ideas around testing, test.generative forces its users to think differently about how their software is constructed and helps drive better code out the other side.

Join Aaron Bedra as he walks through writing some Clojure code and testing it with test.generative. Aaron will start with a simple idea and talk about all the different reasons and ways one might test a solution to the problem. He will explore ways of testing that don't involve any test frameworks at all. Then, just as you think he's about to completely miss the point of the talk, he will pull it all together and show the secret sauce behind test.generative and why you should adopt it into your projects going forward.