Property-Based Smoke Testing in Elixir with ExUnit

Traditional unit testing often misses unexpected edge cases, while writing precise assertions for every possible scenario can become overwhelming. Property-based smoke testing offers a powerful middle ground by automatically generating diverse inputs to ensure your Elixir applications stay stable and crash-free under pressure. This text-only course guides you through the core concepts of generative testing using Elixir and ExUnit, showing you how to find hidden bugs with minimal test code. You will transition from writing manual test cases to designing automated, generative smoke tests that probe your system's boundaries, finding concurrency issues and unhandled exceptions before they reach production. What you'll learn: - Understand the foundational concepts of property-based testing and how smoke tests verify stability. - Configure ExUnit and integrate modern generator libraries like StreamData for data generation. - Write robust smoke tests that execute functions with hundreds of randomized inputs to detect unexpected crashes. - Analyze test failures and use shrinking to isolate the exact minimal input that caused the bug. - Apply stateful testing strategies to evaluate complex Elixir OTP architectures and processes. - Integrate smoke tests into your continuous integration pipeline to ensure ongoing application resilience. The course starts with basic terminology and test design principles, then guides you through building practical code snippets, refining generators, and analyzing test failures step-by-step. It is designed for Elixir developers who are familiar with basic ExUnit testing but want to adopt generative testing techniques; no advanced mathematical background is required. Start reading today to build more resilient Elixir applications with automated smoke testing.