Engineering teams shy away from ambitious projects for good reason: they’re risky, even with the best strategy, execution plan, and team. But just like baggy jeans, the best ideas of the late 90s are back, better than ever, and ready to save us.
RFC 2119, adopted in 1997, gives us unambiguous language for specifying behavior. Quickcheck, released in 1999, lets us turn specifications into executable test suites. In this talk, we’ll combine them to shift ambiguity left, deliver working systems quickly, and ease collaboration with LLMs.
We’ll tackle these topics from the perspective of industry engineers, not academics. From service meshes to distributed databases, Akshay has started and put out production fires of all shapes and sizes – at Uber, Microsoft, and a succession of startups. Come for the introduction to property-based testing, stay for the wizards and robot anteaters.
Key takeaways
- Planning best practices neglect clear specifications.
- Property-based testing produces compact, executable specifications.
- Comprehensive tests help humans (and LLMs!) safely ship otherwise-risky projects.
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