Tyche: Making Sense of PBT Effectiveness

Software developers increasingly rely on automated methods to assess the correctness of their code. One such method is property-based testing (PBT), wherein a test harness generates hundreds or thousands of inputs and checks the outputs of the program on those inputs using parametric properties. Though powerful, PBT induces a sizable gulf of evaluation: developers need to put in nontrivial effort to understand how well the different test inputs exercise the software under test. To bridge this gulf, we propose Tyche, a user interface that supports sensemaking around the effectiveness of property-based tests. Guided by a formative design exploration, our design of Tyche supports developers with interactive, configurable views of test behavior with tight integrations into modern developer testing workflow. These views help developers explore global testing behavior and individual test inputs alike. To accelerate the development of powerful, interactive PBT tools, we define a standard for PBT test reporting and integrate it with a widely used PBT library. A self-guided online usability study revealed that Tyche’s visualizations help developers to more accurately assess software testing effectiveness.