hypothesis.works articles: Testing Configuration Parameters

A lot of applications end up growing a complex configuration system, with a large number of different knobs and dials you can turn to change behaviour. Some of these are just for performance tuning, some change operational concerns, some have other functions.

Testing these is tricky. As the number of parameters goes up, the number of possible configuration goes up exponentially. Manual testing of the different combinations quickly becomes completely unmanageable, not to mention extremely tedious.

Fortunately, this is somewhere where property-based testing in general and Hypothesis in particular can help a lot.