Many coding mistakes are not immediately detectable

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Earlier this week I was reading a paper discussing one aspect of the legal fallout around the UK Post-Office’s Horizon IT system, and was surprised to read the view that the Law Commission’s Evidence in Criminal Proceedings Hearsay and Related Topics were citing on the subject of computer evidence (page 204): “most computer error is either immediately detectable or results from error in the data entered into the machine”.

What? Do I need to waste any time explaining why this is nonsense? It’s obvious nonsense to anybody working in software development, but this view is being expressed in law related documents; what do lawyers know about software development.

Sometimes fallacies become accepted as fact, and a lot of effort is required to expunge them from cultural folklore. Regular readers of this blog will have seen some of my posts on long-standing fallacies in software engineering. It’s worth collecting together some primary evidence that most software mistakes are not immediately detectable.

A paper by Professor Tapper of Oxford University is cited as the source (yes, Oxford, home of mathematical orgasms in software engineering). Tapper’s job title is Reader in Law, and on page 248 he does say: “This seems quite extraordinarily lax, given that most computer error is either immediately detectable or results from error in the data entered into the machine.” So this is not a case of his words being misinterpreted or taken out of context.

Detecting many computer errors is resource intensive, both in elapsed time, manpower and compute time. The following general summary provides some of the evidence for this assertion.

Two events need to occur for a fault experience to occur when running software:

  • a mistake has been made when writing the source code. Mistakes include: a misunderstanding of what the behavior should be, using an algorithm that does not have the desired behavior, or a typo,
  • the program processes input values that interact with a coding mistake in a way that produces a fault experience.

That people can make different mistakes is general knowledge. It is my experience that people underestimate the variability of the range of values that are presented as inputs to a program.

A study by Nagel and Skrivan shows how variability of input values results in fault being experienced at different time, and that different people make different coding mistakes. The study had three experienced developers independently implement the same specification. Each of these three implementations was then tested, multiple times. The iteration sequence was: 1) run program until fault experienced, 2) fix fault, 3) if less than five faults experienced, goto step (1). This process was repeated 50 times, always starting with the original (uncorrected) implementation; the replications varied this, along with the number of inputs used.

How many input values needed to be processed, on average, before a particular fault is experienced? The plot below (code+data) shows the numbers of inputs processed, by one of the implementations, before individual faults were experienced, over 50 runs (sorted by number of inputs needed before the fault was experienced):

Number of inputs processed before particular fault experienced

The plot illustrates that some coding mistakes are more likely to produce a fault experience than others (because they are more likely to interact with input values in a way that generates a fault experience), and it also shows how the number of inputs values processed before a particular fault is experienced varies between coding mistakes.

Real-world evidence of the impact of user input on reported faults is provided by the Ultimate Debian Database, which provides information on the number of reported faults and the number of installs for 14,565 packages. The plot below shows how the number of reported faults increases with the number of times a package has been installed; one interpretation is that with more installs there is a wider variety of input values (increasing the likelihood of a fault experience), another is that with more installs there is a larger pool of people available to report a fault experience. Green line is a fitted power law, faultsReported=1.3*installs^{0.3}, blue line is a fitted loess model.

Number of inputs processed before particular fault experienced

The source containing a mistake may be executed without a fault being experienced; reasons for this include:

  • the input values don’t result in the incorrect code behaving differently from the correct code. For instance, given the made-up incorrect code if (x < 8) (i.e., 8 was typed rather than 7), the comparison only produces behavior that differs from the correct code when x has the value 7,
  • the input values result in the incorrect code behaving differently than the correct code, but the subsequent path through the code produces the intended external behavior.

Some of the studies that have investigated the program behavior after a mistake has deliberately been introduced include:

  • checking the later behavior of a program after modifying the value of a variable in various parts of the source; the results found that some parts of a program were more susceptible to behavioral modification (i.e., runtime behavior changed) than others (i.e., runtime behavior not change),
  • checking whether a program compiles and if its runtime behavior is unchanged after random changes to its source code (in this study, short programs written in 10 different languages were used),
  • 80% of radiation induced bit-flips have been found to have no externally detectable effect on program behavior.

What are the economic costs and benefits of finding and fixing coding mistakes before shipping vs. waiting to fix just those faults reported by customers?

Checking that a software system exhibits the intended behavior takes time and money, and the organization involved may not be receiving any benefit from its investment until the system starts being used.

In some applications the cost of a fault experience is very high (e.g., lowering the landing gear on a commercial aircraft), and it is cost-effective to make a large investment in gaining a high degree of confidence that the software behaves as expected.

In a changing commercial world software systems can become out of date, or superseded by new products. Given the lifetime of a typical system, it is often cost-effective to ship a system expected to contain many coding mistakes, provided the mistakes are unlikely to be executed by typical customer input in a way that produces a fault experience.

Beta testing provides selected customers with an early version of a new release. The benefit to the software vendor is targeted information about remaining coding mistakes that need to be fixed to reduce customer fault experiences, and the benefit to the customer is checking compatibility of their existing work practices with the new release (also, some people enjoy being able to brag about being a beta tester).

  • One study found that source containing a coding mistake was less likely to be changed due to fixing the mistake than changed for other reasons (that had the effect of causing the mistake to disappear),
  • Software systems don't live forever; systems are replaced or cease being used. The plot below shows the lifetime of 202 Google applications (half-life 2.9 years) and 95 Japanese mainframe applications from the 1990s (half-life 5 years; code+data).

    Number of software systems having a given lifetime, in days

Not only are most coding mistakes not immediately detectable, there may be sound economic reasons for not investing in detecting many of them.

Distorting the input profile, to stress test a program

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A fault is experienced in software when there is a mistake in the code, and a program is fed the input values needed for this mistake to generate faulty behavior.

There is suggestive evidence that the distribution of coding mistakes and inputs generating fault experiences both have an influence of fault discovery.

How might these coding mistakes be found?

Testing is one technique, it involves feeding inputs into a program and checking the resulting behavior. What are ‘good’ input values, i.e., values most likely to discover problems? There is no shortage of advice for manually writing tests, suggesting how to select input values, but automatic generation of inputs is often somewhat random (relying on quantity over quality).

Probabilistic grammar driven test generators are trivial to implement. The hard part is tuning the rules and the probability of them being applied.

In most situations an important design aim, when creating a grammar, is to have one rule for each construct, e.g., all arithmetic, logical and boolean expressions are handled by a single expression rule. When generating tests, it does not always make sense to follow this rule; for instance, logical and boolean expressions are much more common in conditional expressions (e.g., controlling an if-statement), than other contexts (e.g., assignment). If the intent is to mimic typical user input values, then the probability of generating a particular kind of binary operator needs to be context dependent; this might be done by having context dependent rules or by switching the selection probabilities by context.

Given a grammar for a program’s input (e.g., the language grammar used by a compiler), decisions have to be made about the probability of each rule triggering. One way of obtaining realistic values is to parse existing input, counting the number of times each rule triggers. Manually instrumenting a grammar to do this is a tedious process, but tool support is now available.

Once a grammar has been instrumented with probabilities, it can be used to generate tests.

Probabilities based on existing input will have the characteristics of that input. A recent paper on this topic (which prompted this post) suggests inverting rule probabilities, so that common becomes rare and vice versa; the idea is that this will maximise the likelihood of a fault being experienced (the assumption is that rarely occurring input will exercise rarely executed code, and such code is more likely to contain mistakes than frequently executed code).

I would go along with the assumption about rarely executed code having a greater probability of containing a mistake, but I don’t think this is the best test generation strategy.

Companies are only interested in fixing the coding mistakes that are likely to result of a fault being experienced by a customer. It is a waste of resources to fix a mistake that will never result in a fault experienced by a customer.

What input is likely to interact with coding mistakes to be the root cause of faults experienced by a customer? I have no good answer to this question. But, given there are customer input contains patterns (at least in the world of source code, and I’m told in other application domains), I would generate test cases that are very similar to existing input, but with one sub-characteristic changed.

In the academic world the incentive is to publish papers reporting loads-of-faults-found, the more the merrier. Papers reporting only a few faults are obviously using inferior techniques. I understand this incentive, but fixing problems costs money and companies want a customer oriented rationale before they will invest in fixing problems before they are reported.

The availability of tools that automate the profiling of a program’s existing input, followed by the generation of input having slightly, or very, different characteristics make it easier to answer some very tough questions about program behavior.

Top, must-read paper on software fault analysis

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

What is the top, must read, paper on software fault analysis?

Software Reliability: Repetitive Run Experimentation and Modeling by Phyllis Nagel and James Skrivan is my choice (it’s actually a report, rather than a paper). Not only is this report full of interesting ideas and data, but it has multiple replications. Replication of experiments in software engineering is very rare; this work was replicated by the original authors, plus Scholz, and then replicated by Janet Dunham and John Pierce, and then again by Dunham and Lauterbach!

I suspect that most readers have never heard of this work, or of Phyllis Nagel or James Skrivan (I hadn’t until I read the report). Being published is rarely enough for work to become well-known, the authors need to proactively advertise the work. Nagel, Dunham & co worked in industry and so did not have any students to promote their work and did not spend time on the academic seminar circuit. Given enough effort it’s possible for even minor work to become widely known.

The study run by Nagel and Skrivan first had three experienced developers independently implement the same specification. Each of these three implementations was then tested, multiple times. The iteration sequence was: 1) run program until fault experienced, 2) fix fault, 3) if less than five faults experienced, goto step (1). The measurements recorded were fault identity and the number of inputs processed before the fault was experienced.

This process was repeated 50 times, always starting with the original (uncorrected) implementation; the replications varied this, along with the number of inputs used.

For a fault to be experienced, there has to be a mistake in the code and the ‘right’ input values have to be processed.

How many input values need to be processed, on average, before a particular fault is experienced? Does the average number of inputs values needed for a fault experience vary between faults, and if so by how much?

The plot below (code+data) shows the numbers of inputs processed, by one of the implementations, before individual faults were experienced, over 50 runs (sorted by number of inputs):

Number of inputs processed before particular fault experienced

Different faults have different probabilities of being experienced, with fault a being experienced on almost any input and fault e occurring much less frequently (a pattern seen in the replications). There is an order of magnitude variation in the number of inputs processed before particular faults are experienced (this pattern is seen in the replications).

Faults were fixed as soon as they were experienced, so the technique for estimating the total number of distinct faults, discussed in a previous post, cannot be used.

A plot of number of faults found against number of inputs processed is another possibility. More on that another time.

Suggestions for top, must read, paper on software faults, welcome (be warned, I think that most published fault research is a waste of time).