Real World Haskell

Chapter 11. Testing and Quality Assurance

Building real systems means caring about quality control, robustness, and correctness. With the right quality assurance mechanisms in place, well-written code can feel like a precision machine, with all functions performing their tasks exactly as specified. There is no sloppiness around the edges, and the final result can be code that is self-explanatory—and obviously correct—the kind of code that inspires confidence.

In Haskell, we have several tools at our disposal for building such precise systems. The most obvious tool, and one built into the language itself, is the expressive type system, which allows for complicated invariants to be enforced statically—making it impossible to write code violating chosen constraints. In addition, purity and polymorphism encourage a style of code that is modular, refactorable, and testable. This is the kind of code that just doesn’t go wrong.

Testing plays a key role in keeping code on the straight-and-narrow path. The main testing mechanisms in Haskell are traditional unit testing (via the HUnit library) and its more powerful descendant, type-based “property” testing, with QuickCheck, an open source testing framework for Haskell. Property-based testing that encourages a high-level approach to testing in the form of abstract invariants functions should satisfy universally, with the actual test data generated for the programmer by the testing library. In this way, code can be hammered with thousands of ...