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

About this episode

Will Wilson discusses innovative approaches to software testing and the challenges involved.

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.

People in this episode

Host: Ron

Guest: Will Wilson

Topics covered

• software testing
• hypervisor
• property-based testing
• fuzzing
• chaos testing
• type systems
• formal methods

Keywords

• testing
• software
• bugs
• program state
• computer science
• chaos testing
• fuzzing
• property-based testing

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Antithesis

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