I listened to “Automate Your Way to Better Code: Advanced Property Testing (with Oskar Wickström)” and I believe that Property-Based Testing (PBT) clicked for me a bit now. Maybe. It never made sense to me before, but Oskar Wickström has a lot of actually interesting examples.

My highlights are instances where you have to think outside the box, like a good puzzle:

• You cannot describe complex actions on random data directly (like cutting gaps from audio tracks); but you can offer inverse actions, like undo operations, and then essentially test that applying an action, undoing it, redoing it, then undoing it again doesn’t change the result.
• Testing a search function, you can’t actually test the search (without implementing the search functionality inside the tests again) because you don’t know the test data. But you can test that filtering the search results works, because filtering should product subsets of the unfiltered search.
• You can describe web apps as state machines with valid transitions and then go ballistics with trying all kinds of interactions. That’s the promise of Quickstrom: You don’t need to specify each state of the web page as an example, but you specify the properties of each valid state and then ensure that no combination of interactions and button presses produces an invalid state. (Relying on app introspection, this probably works much better on the web with headless browsers than in Xcode/on mobile.)

None of this sounds like a replacement for what unit tests would do. But they do sound like a much better high-level approach to regression testing!

If nothing else, I’m intrigued to learn more about this now.

Can absolutely recommend this episode.

Actually, I recommend the whole podacst.