Feature : automatic unit test generation based from contracts about framework HOT 2 OPEN

you put some CDD assertions with phpdeal (or other tool) and you have some automatic unit tests generated automatically

It's called Contract-based Testing. Learn more by reading some research papers like https://hoa-project.net/En/Literature.html#Research.

I got this idea from the Hoa\Praspel project which is a specification language usable for CDD. It is similar to phpdeal, albeit a bit more potent maybe

Don't want to brag or anything, but Praspel is a specification language based on contract-based testing, which provides 2 main features: It can validate data, and it can generate data. That's the whole point of “realistic domains”, the underlying layer of Praspel. This latter feature is a lot more powerful than phpdeal (sorry, I just want to be factual). It is possible to generate strings based on regex, or grammar (it's called Grammar-based Testing). See https://github.com/hoaproject/Regex or https://mnt.io/2014/09/30/generate-strings-based-on-regular-expressions/ for a more in-depth explanation. Or even binary. Or to generate complex object layout. Or to generate complex arrays with a constraint-based solver. Or to combine all of them!

Unfortunately this idea was not pushed more and the main author of Hoa stopped to work on it.

We tried to promote it in several events, conferences, on Internet, Reddit, Twitter etc etc. Apart from a small groups of brave developers, the PHP community wasn't interested by it. We somehow give up after many years while the technology (Praspel) is awesome, and it has received excellent feedbacks in the research community (3 articles, 1 PhD thesis, 1 journal (!)).

Simply port hoaproject/Contributions-atoum-praspelExtension to phpunit since atoum ... well was not successful

That's a good idea. Side note: atoum is far superior to PHPUnit in many regards, but the PHP community is really polarized, and it's hard to move it forward. Implementing Praspel in PHPUnit is an excellent idea though!

Praspel comes with @invariant, @requires (precondition), @ensures (postconditions), @throws (postconditions on exceptions), \old(i) to refer in the post-state to values in the pre-state etc. I think it offers everything you need?

I hope my message doesn't sound too negative. I'm excited to see a new interest in Praspel! And I'm willing to help if you need it :-).

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Hi. Thanks for the input and the great ideas.

But I think phpdeal is not "source" to put this kind of integration into.
I think of phpdeal as a tool to achieve this kind of implementation.

That said. Building an extension for PHPUnit to support Hoa\Praspel sounds nice. This extension then could use phpdeal to add contract based testing.

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