Property-based testing

This style of software testing is known by multiple names, perhaps begun to be popularized by the QuickCheck library, created in 1999:

property-based testing
specification-based testing
generative testing (this term may have been originated in the Clojure development community, where the test.check and test.generative libraries were inspired by QuickCheck)
constrained random testing (this name is probably more often used in computer hardware testing)

I am aware of at least the property-based and constrained random parts of this technique used in hardware testing at least a decade earlier than QuickCheck was created, but it isn't clear to me where to find references to articles or books on this (please let me know if you know of any). QuickCheck is the first place I have heard of the idea of automatically shrinking test cases that demonstrate bugs, to find a shorter/smaller test case that also does so.

Lecture videos

John Hughes, "Testing the Hard Stuff and Staying Sane", Clojure/West Conference, March 2014, [YouTube] [transcript]

John discusses several examples of finding bugs in stateful systems implemented in C and Erlang using QuickCheck. He starts with a simple C implementation of a bounded FIFO queue of integers. He then discusses his experience developing property-based tests for automotive software. He ends with an example of finding bugs that were only found with multiple clients running in parallel, accessing a database system.

John Hughes, "The Mysteries of Dropbox", Lambda Days, 2016, [YouTube]

This is one of the more complicated uses of property-based testing I have seen, complicated because of the many possible behaviors one can observe and consider correct when using a file synchronization service like Dropbox from multiple clients in parallel.

There are more recorded talks by John Hughes, and others that work at QuviQ, on their seminars page.

Books

This is the only book I am aware of on this topic:

Fred Hebert, "Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir: Find Bugs Before Your Users Do", 2019, https://pragprog.com/book/fhproper/property-based-testing-with-proper-erlang-and-elixir

Review of that book: https://medium.com/erlang-battleground/property-based-testing-erlang-elixir-de72ad24966b

Research papers

Koen Claessen, John Hughes, "QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs", Proc. of 5th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP), 2000, Montreal, Canada, http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/john-hughes/quick.pdf Also dl.acm.org

Koen Claessen, John Hughes, "Testing Monadic Code with QuickCheck", SIGPLAN Notices 37(12): 47-59 (2002) www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/QuickCheckST.ps

Thomas Arts, John Hughes, Joakim Johansson, Ulf Wiger, "Testing Telecoms Software with Quviq QuickCheck", Erlang '06 Sep. 16, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA, http://www.quviq.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/erlang001-arts.pdf