Events

The second meet up of the Erlang User Group will be on Monday 28/1 @ 19.00 in Erlang Training and Consulting's offices in London. The meet up will feature a presentation from Thomas Arts, of Quviq AB and the IT University of Gothenburg. He will talk about testing large Erlang based systems, including formal methods and property based testing. The presentation will be followed by Pizza and drinks. Those still standing at 8pm can then make their way to a quiet pub down the road and continue chatting and networking. This is a free event sponsored by Erlang Training and Consulting and Skills Matter. As we need to let security have your names and need in advance, ensure we have a room big enough (There were 60 of us last meeting!), and most important, know how much Pizza to order, you have to register by sending an email to alison _at_ erlang-consulting.com The event is free and open to every one, as long as you have registered. Abstract: How do you test large systems written in Erlang? With the growth of software complexity we need new technology to ensure quality of the final product. Testing has so far been one of the most used techniques to check the quality of the end product. Since the amount of software configurations is huge for each product, testing all these configurations is impractical. Mathematical techniques under the name of formal methods, address this by tools as Model Checkers and Theorem Provers. Several of these techniques have been developed for Erlang as well as for many other languages. In practice, they are difficult to use and expensive to deploy. Property Based Testing joins the benefits of the formal verification techniques with the ease of testing. Instead of writing test cases, one copies the idea of formal methods to write a property of the software, e.g., "no matter how many ATMs are connected to our bank and no matter in which order the ATMs send their messages, money may not dissapear from the system". Instead of a mathematical prove that this holds, a large amount of test cases is automatically generated from this property and all these tests are checked against the system. Property Based Testing is used small scale today at companies like Ericsson, Erlang Training and Consulting and a few others. The goal of the ProTest project is to introduce more tools and techniques that enable widened use of Property Based Testing. For example by combining it with re-factoring of test cases and properties, by connecting it to trace analysis and audit logs, and by integrating it with model checking techniques. This will result in a very powerful method supported by a good set of integrated tools that make Erlang programmers even more productive. Bio: Thomas Arts Dr Thomas Arts is Associate professor at the IT University of Goteborg in the area of Software Engineering and Management. Thomas is also co-founder and CTO of Quviq, a small company that produced Quick Check, a testing tool for Erlang. He holds a PhD in computer science and has after his PhD been employed at the Ericsson Computer Science Lab (Where they invented Erlang) where he worked on program verification and the development of the Erlang programming language. He has worked in the broad spectrum theoretical computer science, formal methods and industrial case-study research, mainly applying all kind of techniques to systems written in Erlang. He has more than 30 publications in journals and refereed conferences/workshops. He has successfully introduced some new technologies in industry. The latest technology, QuickCheck, is a tool for property based testing and aims to support test driven development.