hypothesis.works articles: How Hypothesis Works

Hypothesis has a very different underlying implementation to any other property-based testing system. As far as I know, it’s an entirely novel design that I invented.

Central to this design is the following feature set which every Hypothesis strategy supports automatically (the only way to break this is by having the data generated depend somehow on external global state):

1. All generated examples can be safely mutated
2. All generated examples can be saved to disk (this is important because Hypothesis remembers and replays previous failures).
3. All generated examples can be shrunk
4. All invariants that hold in generation must hold during shrinking ( though the probability distribution can of course change, so things which are only supported with high probability may not be).

(Essentially no other property based systems manage one of these claims, let alone all)

The initial mechanisms for supporting this were fairly complicated, but after passing through a number of iterations I hit on a very powerful underlying design that unifies all of these features.

It’s still fairly complicated in implementation, but most of that is optimisations and things needed to make the core idea work. More importantly, the complexity is quite contained: A fairly small kernel handles all of the complexity, and there is little to no additional complexity (at least, compared to how it normally looks) in defining new strategies, etc.

This article will give a high level overview of that model and how it works.