Praspel: A Specification Language for Contract-Based Testing in PHP

We introduce in this paper a new specification language named Praspel, for PHP Realistic Annotation and SPEcification Language. This language is based on the Design-by-Contract paradigm. Praspel clauses annotate methods of a PHP class in order to both specify their contracts, using pre- and postconditions, and assign realistic domains to the method parameters. A realistic domain describes a set of concrete, and hopefully relevant, values that can be assigned to the data of a program (class attributes and method parameters). Praspel is implemented into a unit test generator for PHP that offers a random test data generator, which computes test data, coupled with a runtime assertion checker, which decides whether a test passes or fails by checking the satisfaction of the contracts at run-time.

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