On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Property-Based Testing for Validating Formal Specifications

https://proofsandintuitions.net/2026/05/18/property-based-testing-specifications/

#Testing #SoftwareEngineering #FormalMethods

On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Property-Based Testing for Validating Formal Specifications

In this post, we show that property-based testing (PBT) is surprisingly effective for validating LLM-synthesised specifications of Lean programs: it is a cheap alternative to symbolic proofs, which helped to detect underspecification in 10% of the specs in state-of-the-art benchmarks for verified code generation.

Proofs and Intuitions