Software products released into the field typically have some number of residual defects that either were not detected or could not have been detected during testing. This may be the result of flaws in the test cases themselves, incorrect assumptions made during the creation of test cases, or the infeasibility of testing the sheer number of possible configurations for a complex system; these defects may also be due to application states that were not considered during lab testing, or corrupted states that could arise due to a security violation. One approach to this problem is to continue to test these applications even after deployment, in hopes of finding any remaining flaws. In this paper, we present a testing methodology we call in vivo testing, in which tests are continuously executed in the deployment environment. We also describe a type of test we call in vivo tests that are specifically designed for use with such an approach: these tests execute within the current state of the program (rather than by creating a clean slate) without affecting or altering that state from the perspective of the end-user. We discuss the approach and the prototype testing framework for Java applications called Invite. We also provide the results of case studies that demonstrate Invite's effectiveness and efficiency.

The in vivo software testing approach focuses on testing live applications by executing unit tests throughout the lifecycle, including after deployment. The motivation is that the "known state" approach of traditional unit testing is unrealistic; deployed applications rarely operate under such conditions, and it may be more informative to perform the testing in live environments. One of the limitations of this approach is the high performance cost it incurs, as the unit tests are executed in parallel with the application. Here we present distributed in vivo testing, which focuses on easing the burden by sharing the load across multiple instances of the application of interest. That is, we elevate the scope of in vivo testing from a single instance to a community of instances, all participating in the testing process. Our approach is different from prior work in that we are actively testing during execution, as opposed to passively monitoring the application or conducting tests in the user environment prior to execution. We discuss new extensions to the existing in vivo testing framework (called Invite) and present empirical results that show the performance overhead improves linearly with the number of clients.

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