Automating Targeted Property-Based Testing

Targeted property-based testing is an enhanced form of property-based testing (PBT) where the input generation is guided by a search strategy instead of being random, thereby combining the strengths of QuickCheck-like and search-based testing techniques. To use it, however, the user currently needs to specify a search strategy and also supply all ingredients that the search strategy requires. This is often a laborious process and makes targeted PBT less attractive than its random counterpart. In this paper, we focus on simulated annealing, the default search strategy of our tool, and present a technique that automatically creates all the ingredients that targeted PBT requires starting from only a random generator. Our experiments, comparing the automatically generated ingredients to fine-tuned manually written ones, show that the performance that one obtains is sufficient and quite competitive in practice.