stjordanis/testing-erlang-book

A public book on testing Erlang

Testing Erlang

I have created a new book on using QuickCheck with Erlang which you can find here http://www.erlang-quickcheck-book.com/

About this Book

Erlang has existed for a long time but has only recently become a trending language that is being used in more and more places as people find that Erlang is the perfect fit for building networked concurrent applications for the web and other places.

However in order to make a high performance scalable applications developers need to test those applications. The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to how to do different types of testing in Erlang.

This book starts with using EUnit for building Unit Tests in Erlang. It will then move on to other kinds of testing in Erlang. Including Statistical tests with PropER, Setting up CI with Jenkins or Travis, building performance tests and more.

Erlang also has a good set of tools for for static testing, Kostis Sagonas's research group has been working on a set of tools which provide a powerful aid to development of applications. These include Dialyzer which will find all sorts of discrepancies in a code base, including non matching types, and code that can never be executed. In addition they have created a tool called Concuerror which can detect all sorts of concurrency errors.

Building as open source

This is "Testing Erlang" which is an experiment in collective authoring of a book on how to do Testing in Erlang. I want to tap the collective mind of the internet to make this book amazing and to cover a wide range of topics.

This book is for now a work in progress and is at an early phase. When the book is finished it will be published by O'Reilly media.

Technical Details

This project is being written in AsciiDoc which is a pretty simple format, you can find details here: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

How do you decide what to include

Mostly its what ever I am working with on a given day. If I am doing unit testing I will be adding content about unit tests. If I am working on Stress testing then I will be writing about that.

Why haven't you included something about "X"

Probably because it hasn't come up in any of my projects. Feel free to start work on it and send me a pull request!

To Contribute

If you want to contribute to this project please read the style guide first. After that fork this project and send a pull request.

Any content I receive by pull request may be included in the book, so if you don't want your content included please don't send it to me. Also please make sure I have your name and email address, If you want to include your twitter handle or other contact details please feel free.

If you are adding a new chapter please add a link into "book.asciidoc.html" in the "New Chapters" section

Style Guide

Each chapter should be its own file named <topic.asciidoc> So unit tests are eunit.asciidoc There should also be a directory eunit with sub directories images and src that contains source code, figures and so on for each chapter.

Indent code with spaces not tabs, make it easy to read. Make sure all code is referenced in the text in some useful way.

To Build

To build this on Linux install the asciidoc package (via yum or apt-get) make a html directory and run the build.sh script this will turn everything into HTML

Chapters

• Preface
• Building With Rebar
• Eunit
• Common Test
• Dialyzer
• Proper
• Quick Check
• Testing a FSM With Properties
• Wrangler
• Concerrer
• Continuous Integration
• Best Practice