icst2018.txt

Targeted property-based testing is an enhanced form of property-based testing
(PBT) where the input generation is guided by a search strategy instead of being
random, thereby combining the strengths of QuickCheck-like and search-based
testing techniques.
To use it, however, the user currently needs to specify a search
strategy and also supply all ingredients that the search strategy requires.
This is often a laborious process and makes targeted PBT less attractive
than its random counterpart.
In this paper, we focus on simulated annealing, the default search strategy
of our tool, and present a technique that automatically creates all the
ingredients that targeted PBT requires starting from only a random generator.
Our experiments, comparing the automatically generated ingredients to fine-tuned
manually written ones, show that the performance that one obtains
is sufficient and quite competitive in practice.