{"title":"Preventing data errors with continuous testing","authors":"Kivanç Muslu, Yuriy Brun, A. Meliou","doi":"10.1145/2771783.2771792","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Today, software systems that rely on data are ubiquitous, and ensuring the data's quality is an increasingly important challenge as data errors result in annual multi-billion dollar losses. While software debugging and testing have received heavy research attention, less effort has been devoted to data debugging: identifying system errors caused by well-formed but incorrect data. We present continuous data testing (CDT), a low-overhead, delay-free technique that quickly identifies likely data errors. CDT continuously executes domain-specific test queries; when a test fails, CDT unobtrusively warns the user or administrator. We implement CDT in the ConTest prototype for the PostgreSQL database management system. A feasibility user study with 96 humans shows that ConTest was extremely effective in a setting with a data entry application at guarding against data errors: With ConTest, users corrected 98.4% of their errors, as opposed to 40.2% without, even when we injected 40% false positives into ConTest's output. Further, when using ConTest, users corrected data entry errors 3.2 times faster than when using state-of-the-art methods.","PeriodicalId":264859,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"29","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2771783.2771792","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 29
Abstract
Today, software systems that rely on data are ubiquitous, and ensuring the data's quality is an increasingly important challenge as data errors result in annual multi-billion dollar losses. While software debugging and testing have received heavy research attention, less effort has been devoted to data debugging: identifying system errors caused by well-formed but incorrect data. We present continuous data testing (CDT), a low-overhead, delay-free technique that quickly identifies likely data errors. CDT continuously executes domain-specific test queries; when a test fails, CDT unobtrusively warns the user or administrator. We implement CDT in the ConTest prototype for the PostgreSQL database management system. A feasibility user study with 96 humans shows that ConTest was extremely effective in a setting with a data entry application at guarding against data errors: With ConTest, users corrected 98.4% of their errors, as opposed to 40.2% without, even when we injected 40% false positives into ConTest's output. Further, when using ConTest, users corrected data entry errors 3.2 times faster than when using state-of-the-art methods.