Taking the guesswork out of testing
By: Les Hatton
The talk accompanying this paper is about two things. First, it is about the need for objective
levels of confidence in the way we do experiments in computing and the way we analyse the
results. Second, it is about searching for patterns when you don't really know what you are
looking for.
When we do an experiment in computing, we will accumulate data in some form, under some
experimental conditions. These data will contain patterns of interest but when we have
extracted our patterns by whatever means, it is vital that we determine if the patterns are
meaningful or simply random statistical fluctuations. In the parlance of mathematical
statistics, we have show that they are significant. Only statistically significant patterns are
likely to help us improve what we do. In this area, computing is very naive indeed. If I had a
pound for every time I have seen somebody assert that "A is bigger than B, so A is better than
B", I would be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. That's not how it works at all. If I toss
two coins and get 53 heads with one and 57 heads with the other, we all know perfectly well
that this does not mean that the second coin is "better" than the first at producing heads and
yet many computer scientists and practitioners are all too willing to accept an equivalent
statement, "Technique A found more defects than Technique B, so Technique A is better."
This is simply not good enough. To be of use to the practitioner, we need to be able to say,
"Technique A found more defects than Technique B and the possibility of this happening by
chance alone is less than 1 in 20, (5% being a normally accepted statistical measure of
confidence)." In other words, the practitioner would then be pretty confident that Technique
A would be more effective than Technique B and therefore worthy of investing our precious
testing time. As it stands however, with most attempts at experimentation in computing, the
practitioner has no idea of how reliable the results are, so as a result, we are simply blind.
We have been blind for the best part of 50 years but today, systems are immense, with many
consumer systems creeping towards millions of lines of code, if not tens of millions. We
need determinism and efficiency in our testing methods more than ever before to prevent the
kind of expensive failure which has become all too common. Exhaustive testing is simply
not an option and on typical systems has been infeasible for many years.
The second subject of this paper is "Data Rummaging", just one of the techniques at hand to
the forensic software researcher. Rummaging is a wonderful word. You don't often see it
used nowadays but its dictionary meaning of "... throw about, in searching ..." says it all. Too
often we see "Data mining" used in computing, but the trouble with "mining" is that it
assumes you know what you are looking for, as in mining for gold, or mining for uranium.
When you plunge into the bowels of a failed software system or some great steaming pile of
data which somebody has laughingly passed off as a database, you hardly ever know what
you are looking for at the beginning. On a number of occasions, you might not know what
you were looking for at the end either but that's show biz and a sense of humour is a valuable
part of the job.
This is particularly apposite of failure data. There is general agreement and has been for
hundreds of years that seeking to understand why something has failed casts invaluable light
on what might happen in the future. Like so many things in engineering, the Japanese have a
nice compact graphical aphorism for this: "on-ko-chi-shin" which looks far prettier in its
Kanji form and translates as "the past holds the answers for the future." Unfortunately, they
do not have an expression for the computing equivalent, "the past holds the answers for the
future but we are having far too good a time to be bothered to learn, so we will just invent
something even more fantastically improbable than what we are doing already and do that
instead before anybody catches on that we haven't a clue."
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