4 ms·

Make me think about could we use a robot to fuzz physical inputs.

mhh__ 8y ago
Probably not cost effective as opposed to either making the software more resilient or just letting some monkeys/interns loose in the cockpit and pressing everything (With some focused searches obviously)
- noir_lord 8y ago
  I don't know, I suspect software resiliency is one of those "gets exponentially more expensive as you approach perfect" situations and a robot could bash inputs at speeds a human couldn't in thousands of orders, it would certainly let you test those weird code paths that blow up when they are never exercised until they are.
  - mhh__ 8y ago
    It does get exponentially more expensive, which is why you have to pick a certain level of ~perfection~ and then stop. Also, the robots would have to bash at the speed of a human: The point is to mimick human inputs not necessarily test every code path (Which you could do in software)
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      When testing resiliency software testing isn't the whole of the thing. I spent a lot of time at new job (well 18mths now) on making the software side more resilient, we still had a site wide outage of internet access and comms and internal systems because one of the women in the sales office unplugged a socket in the ingress comms cabinet to plug her hair straighteners in. Coincidentally my request to have physical access control on all the comms cabinets shot right up the list. The boundary layer between software and hardware itself has to be tested, the real world is a messy place :).
- lallysingh 8y ago
  ..or not requiring physical hardware to test?
  - mhh__ 8y ago
    How? Planes won't not have cockpits for decades surely.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      The software has some interface to the physical controls.
- bigiain 8y ago
  I wonder if selling tickets to watch would offset that somewhat? I'd pay quite a lot of money to camp out in the desert for a week watching fuzzing robots try to crash airliners...

Probably not cost effective as opposed to either making the software more resilient or just letting some monkeys/interns loose in the cockpit and pressing everything (With some focused searches obviously)

noir_lord 8y ago
I don't know, I suspect software resiliency is one of those "gets exponentially more expensive as you approach perfect" situations and a robot could bash inputs at speeds a human couldn't in thousands of orders, it would certainly let you test those weird code paths that blow up when they are never exercised until they are.
- mhh__ 8y ago
  It does get exponentially more expensive, which is why you have to pick a certain level of ~perfection~ and then stop. Also, the robots would have to bash at the speed of a human: The point is to mimick human inputs not necessarily test every code path (Which you could do in software)
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    When testing resiliency software testing isn't the whole of the thing. I spent a lot of time at new job (well 18mths now) on making the software side more resilient, we still had a site wide outage of internet access and comms and internal systems because one of the women in the sales office unplugged a socket in the ingress comms cabinet to plug her hair straighteners in. Coincidentally my request to have physical access control on all the comms cabinets shot right up the list. The boundary layer between software and hardware itself has to be tested, the real world is a messy place :).
lallysingh 8y ago
..or not requiring physical hardware to test?
- mhh__ 8y ago
  How? Planes won't not have cockpits for decades surely.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    The software has some interface to the physical controls.
bigiain 8y ago
I wonder if selling tickets to watch would offset that somewhat? I'd pay quite a lot of money to camp out in the desert for a week watching fuzzing robots try to crash airliners...