Tools & Code: Microsoft “Pex”: Helps Developers Develop Better Unit Tests

Pex: Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET

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Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs. Watch the screencast!

Pex generates Unit Tests from hand-written Parameterized Unit Tests through Automated Exploratory Testing based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution.

• Unit Tests: parameterless methods that test a single unit of code

• Parameterized Unit Tests: same as above, but with parameters

• Automated Exploratory Testing: A tool-supported process of running, learning and testing code at the same time

• Dynamic Symbolic Execution: A combination of static analysis and runtime monitoring to compute test inputs