# Field Testing of Software Applications

## TL;DR

This paper explores using real-world field environments as a testing ground for software, aiming to identify faults that are hard to detect through traditional in-house testing methods.

## Contribution

It proposes leveraging the diversity of field environments as an effective way to uncover software faults that are difficult to predict and test in controlled settings.

## Key findings

- Field testing reveals faults missed in in-house testing.
- Diverse environments increase fault detection effectiveness.
- Field-based testing complements traditional verification methods.

## Abstract

When interacting with their software systems, users may have to deal with problems like crashes, failures, and program instability. Faulty software running in the field is not only the consequence of ineffective in-house verification and validation techniques, but it is also due to the complexity and diversity of the interactions between an application and its environment. Many of these interactions can be hardly predicted at testing time, and even when they could be predicted, often there are so many cases to be tested that they cannot be all feasibly addressed before the software is released. This Ph.D. thesis investigates the idea of addressing the faults that cannot be effectively addressed in house directly in the field, exploiting the field itself as testbed for running the test cases. An enormous number of diverse environments would then be available for testing, giving the possibility to run many test cases in many different situations, timely revealing the many failures that would be hard to detect otherwise.