From Examples to Exhaustive: Intro to Property-Based Testing

This talk teaches a powerful technique to test exhaustively by simply describing the relation of the output to the input, rather than tediously selecting many inputs and outputs. So, the audience will be able to test far more thoroughly, with less effort. There will be examples, and libraries named.

Tired of writing countless test cases, thinking up random examples? Discover how property-based testing can revolutionize your testing process, making it exhaustive with minimal effort. Property-Based Testing generates vast numbers of robust yet simple test cases, automatically – and if it finds a problem, most tools will narrow it down to the exact edge cases. You will come away equipped with a powerful technique to uncover edge cases and exceptions you never knew existed, while actually writing fewer tests.

Depending on conference preference, this might be done in Elixir, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, or maybe other languages if I have lead time to delve into their tooling.

I have done this for one conference so far, Software Quality Days, in Vienna, Austria, in May 2026.

Agenda: - Status quo: testing by looking at chosen examples - The problem with the status quo - Basic explanation of Property Testing - Simple and slightly more complex examples - “Shrinking” to find edge cases - FAQs - Recap/Wrapup - Q&A