Last year at Droidcon Online Xavier Gouchet gave a talk titled: “It’s time to up your test game“. Here he talked about testing and more specifically fuzz testing.

Wikipedia describes fuzz testing as follows:

Fuzzing or fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique that involves providing invalid, unexpected, or random data as inputs to a computer program. The program is then monitored for exceptions such as crashes, failing built-in code assertions, or potential memory leaks.

Wikipedia

In his talk he introduced Elmyr:

A Kotlin library providing tools to generate “random” values.

Elmyr github page

Seeing how easy it was to use Elmyr, it got me inspired to start using it in my own projects as well. About a month ago I found some time to get started and I’m loving it!

Adding and using Elmyr turned out to be super easy. It took very little time to get up and running.

What surprised me most is that almost immediately I found a bug in my code due to the random test data that Elmyr produces!

Another thing I really like is that I no longer need to think about what test data to use with my subject under test. All I need to do is ask Elmyr to give me some random data.

If you need Elmyr to support some of your own classes for fuzzing, simply create a new ForgeryFactory, add it to the Forge in your test and you’re done.

Now I wish that I learned about fuzz testing ages ago!

If Elmyr doesn’t do the trick for you, Github hosts tons of other fuzzing libraries.