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Pretty sad that an approach this simple can kill so many apps
Pretty sad that an approach this simple can kill so many apps
Posted Oct 21, 2004 1:47 UTC (Thu) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157)Parent article: How to kill a web browser
I seem to recall a very similar test being done with unix command-line
utilities, at which gnu fared extremely well.
FWIW: Konqueror from CVS HEAD passes all the 'example' tests but dies when
you click on the 'big honking' warning' :-(
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crashme, fuzz, etc.. are good tools!
Posted Oct 21, 2004 4:48 UTC (Thu) by dank (subscriber, #1865) [Link]
You're thinking of 'fuzz', I think:http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~bart/fuzz/
Another, older, test was 'crashme', which did similar
things for kernels (and found an exploitable bug
in sparc's math instructions early on). There
were probably other implementations, but one is at:
http://people.delphiforums.com/gjc/crashme.html
These are both examples of software fault injection
systems. I think
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/sieh02umlinux.html
has a list of others...
crashme, fuzz, etc.. are good tools!
Posted Oct 21, 2004 9:18 UTC (Thu) by hildeb (subscriber, #6532) [Link]
I took this even further in my diploma thesis.http://www.infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/st/papers/issta2000/
crashme, fuzz, etc.. are good tools!
Posted Oct 21, 2004 10:09 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I must say, the automated cause-effect chain analysis stuff linked from there looks quite thoroughly fascinating.
Pretty sad that an approach this simple can kill so many apps
Posted Oct 21, 2004 6:14 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
As I recall, the GNU utilities didn't do "extremely well"; they just did better than any of the commercial equivalents extant at the time. That's not the same thing.
GNU vs proprietary utilities and garbage input
Posted Oct 23, 2004 19:28 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]
If it's the study I'm thinking of, it was the first of its kind and was groundbreaking.ca. 1989, a university research project fed garbage input to a bunch of classic Unix programs and watched them crash. They found that the proprietary programs crashed more than GNU. It wasn't a LOT more, but the fact that it wasn't a lot less flew in the face of conventional wisdom at that time, which was that proprietary software had to have fewer bugs than free software because of all the money behind it for testing and other quality assurance activity.
Then the same team shed some light on the reason for the difference by repeating the study on current versions of the same programs two years later. At the conclusion of the original, they had reported the bugs, and fixes where possible, to the maintainers. In the followup, most of the free software had been fixed, almost none of the proprietary had.
This made sense to me as a software developer for IBM. I certainly didn't have the power to fix a bug in my program just because I found out about it. But free software developers can quite easily fix a bug.
That was the beginning of my conviction that shipping debuggable, fixable code early is better than shipping presumably bug-free code late.