Etna: An Evaluation Platform for Property-Based Testing

TL;DR

ETNA is an extensible platform designed for empirical evaluation and comparison of property-based testing techniques across multiple frameworks and languages, aiding users in understanding best practices.

Contribution

It introduces a unified platform that simplifies benchmarking and comparison of PBT methods, addressing the lack of rigorous evaluation in the literature.

Findings

ETNA enables clear comparison of PBT strategies across languages.

Experiments demonstrate tradeoffs among popular PBT approaches.

Platform facilitates understanding of best practices in property-based testing.

Abstract

Property-based testing is a mainstay of functional programming, boasting a rich literature, an enthusiastic user community, and an abundance of tools~ -- so many, indeed, that new users may have difficulty choosing. Moreover, any given framework may support a variety of strategies for generating test inputs; even experienced users may wonder which are better in any given situation. Sadly, the PBT literature, though long on creativity, is short on rigorous comparisons to help answer such questions. We present ETNA, a platform for empirical evaluation and comparison of PBT techniques. ETNA incorporates a number of popular PBT frameworks and testing workloads from the literature, and its extensible architecture makes adding new ones easy, while handling the technical drudgery of performance measurement. To illustrate its benefits, we use ETNA to carry out several experiments with popular PBT approaches in Rocq, Haskell, OCaml, Racket, and Rust, allowing users to more clearly understand best practices and tradeoffs.