The increasing complexity of software and its execution environment makes in-house software testing challenging. Field testing, which conducts software testing in production environments, is a potential solution to this issue. However, existing field testing systems have not seen widespread use due to their inconvenience, lack of generality, and limited capabilities. We identify four essential requirements that a practical field testing system must fulfill: robust, efficient, handy, and versatile. This paper presents the design and implementation of Jaft, a field testing system for Java software meeting the aforementioned requirements through its design of field testing API, isolation mechanism, and runtime module. Evaluation results show that it has acceptable runtime overhead and can improve test effectiveness.

Abstract We give an account of JPF’s current architecture as it has evolved over the last 20 years. Key changes include a modular, extensible design, and Java 11 support. Java 11 brought with it fundamental changes in the language and its runtime, in particular, a new modular library system, different compilation of string expressions to bootstrap methods, and changes in many internal interfaces that allow access to the loaded code and the virtual machine state. These changes required numerous adaptations in JPF to ensure a successful compilation and correct behavior under Java 11.