Praspel: A Specification Language for Contract-Based Testing in PHP

International audienceIn previous works, we have proposed Praspel, a framework for contract-based testing in PHP. Among others, it includes a specification language and a unit test generator which automatically generates test data from formal preconditions. The generator sometimes rejects data, when they do not satisfy parts of the preconditions. In many cases, generation with rejection is not efficient enough. Thus we investigate practical contexts where more efficient generation algorithms can be designed and we extend Praspel with their implementation. After strings, that we have already considered, the most frequent data type in PHP is arrays. They cover most of the needs for collections, because they can store key-value pairs of any kind, they do not have a specific length or depth, and they are efficiently implemented. In this paper, we report on a study to know what are the most popular constraints on PHP arrays. Then we formalize these constraints and we present an implementation in PHP of a constraint solver for these constraints. In this context, the constraint-based approach removes all the rejections

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“…This section is a reminder of [7]. It shortly presents the notion of realistic domain and its application to PHP programs.…”

Section: Realistic Domains and Praspelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In previous works, we have introduced Praspel [7], a toolsupported specification language for contract-based testing in PHP [8]. Praspel extends contracts with the notion of realistic domain, which makes it possible to assign a domain of values to data (class attributes or method parameters).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Constraint Solver for PHP Arrays

Enderlin

Giorgetti

Bouquet

2013

2013 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops

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“…This section presents the notion of realistic domain and its application to PHP programs [11]. Realistic domains are designed for test generation purposes.…”

Section: Realistic Domains and Praspelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a previous work, we have introduced Praspel, a toolsupported specification language for contract-based testing in PHP [11]. Praspel extends contracts with the notion of realistic domain, which makes it possible to assign a domain of values to data (class attributes or method parameters).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar-Based Testing Using Realistic Domains in PHP

Enderlin

Dadeau

Giorgetti

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation

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This paper presents an integration of grammarbased testing in a framework for contract-based testing in PHP. It relies on the notion of realistic domains, that make it possible to assign domains to data, by means of contract assertions written inside the source code of a PHP application. Then a test generation tool uses the contracts to generate relevant test data for unit testing. Finally a runtime assertion checker validates the assertions inside the contracts (among others membership of data to realistic domains) to establish the conformance verdict. We introduce here the possibility to generate and validate complex textual data specified by a grammar written in a dedicated grammar description language. This approach is tool-supported and experimented on the validation of web applications.

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