PrologCheck - Property-Based Testing in Prolog

Abstract

We present PrologCheck, an automatic tool for property-based testing of programs in the logic programming language Prolog with randomised test data generation. The tool is inspired by the well known QuickCheck, originally designed for the functional programming language Haskell. It includes features that deal with specific characteristics of Prolog such as its relational nature (as opposed to Haskell) and the absence of a strong type discipline. PrologCheck expressiveness stems from describing properties as Prolog goals. It enables the definition of custom test data generators for random testing tailored for the property to be tested. Further, it allows the use of a predicate specification language that supports types, modes and constraints on the number of successful computations. We evaluate our tool on a number of examples and apply it successfully to debug a Prolog library for AVL search trees.