Bebugging (or fault seeding or error seeding) is a popular software engineering technique used in the 1970s to measure
test coverage. Known bugs are randomly added to a program source code and the
software tester
Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to apprecia ...
is tasked to find them. The percentage of the known bugs not found gives an indication of the real bugs that remain.
The term "bebugging" was first mentioned in ''The Psychology of Computer Programming'' (1970), where
Gerald M. Weinberg described the use of the method as a way of training, motivating, and evaluating programmers, not as a measure of faults remaining in a program. The approach was borrowed from the
SAGE system, where it was used to keep operators watching radar screens alert. Here's a quote from the original use of the term:
An early application of bebugging was
Harlan Mills
Harlan D. Mills (May 14, 1919 – January 8, 1996) was Professor of Computer Science at the Florida Institute of Technology and founder of Software Engineering Technology, Inc. of Vero Beach, Florida (since acquired by Q-Labs). Mills' cont ...
's fault seeding approach which was later refined by stratified fault-seeding.
[L. J. Morell and J. M. Voas, "Infection and Propagation Analysis: A Fault-Based Approach to Estimating Software Reliability," College of William and Mary in Virginia, Department of Computer Science September, 1988.] These techniques worked by adding a number of known faults to a software system for the purpose of monitoring the rate of detection and removal. This assumed that it is possible to estimate the number of remaining faults in a software system still to be detected by a particular test methodology.
Bebugging is a type of
fault injection
In computer science, fault injection is a testing technique for understanding how computing systems behave when stressed in unusual ways. This can be achieved using physical- or software-based means, or using a hybrid approach. Widely studied phys ...
.
See also
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Fault injection
In computer science, fault injection is a testing technique for understanding how computing systems behave when stressed in unusual ways. This can be achieved using physical- or software-based means, or using a hybrid approach. Widely studied phys ...
*
Mutation testing
Mutation testing (or ''mutation analysis'' or ''program mutation'') is used to design new software tests and evaluate the quality of existing software tests. Mutation testing involves modifying a program in small ways. Each mutated version is call ...
References
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Software testing