Startseite
Podcasts
Signals and Threads Podcast
Why Testing is Hard and How to Fix it with Will Wilson

Why Testing is Hard and How to Fix it with Will Wilson

Signals and Threads vor 7 Monaten

0:00

1:48:26

Will Wilson is the founder and CEO of Antithesis, which is trying
to change how people test software. The idea is that you run your
application inside a special hypervisor environment that
intelligently (and deterministically) explores the program’s
state space, allowing you to pinpoint and replay the events
leading to crashes, bugs, and violations of invariants. In this
episode, he and Ron take a broad view of testing, considering not
just “the unreasonable effectiveness of example-based tests” but
also property-based testing, fuzzing, chaos testing, type
systems, and formal methods. How do you blend these techniques to
find the subtle, show-stopper bugs that will otherwise wake you
up at 3am? As Will has discovered, making testing less painful is
actually a tour of some of computer science’s most vexing and
interesting problems.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

Antithesis, Will’s company

FoundationDB’s deterministic simulation framework

QuickCheck — the original Haskell property-based testing
library, by Koen Claessen and John Hughes

Hypothesis — property-based testing for Python, created by
David MacIver

QuviQ — John Hughes’ company commercializing QuickCheck,
including automotive testing work

Netflix Chaos Monkey

Goodhart’s law — “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases
to be a good measure”

CAP theorem — the impossibility result for distributed
systems that FoundationDB claims to have in some sense violated.

Paxos — the consensus algorithm FoundationDB reimplemented
from scratch

Large cardinals, an area Will studied before abandoning
mathematics

Lyapunov exponent — measure of chaotic divergence

Chesterton’s fence

The Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel

Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes

Barak Richman, “How Community Institutions Create Economic
Advantage: Jewish Diamond Merchants in New York”