buggintroduktion

buggintroduktion is a term used in software engineering to describe the deliberate introduction of defects into a system for the purposes of testing, training, and research. The concept draws from the idea of fault injection and is often discussed in Swedish-language contexts, where introduktion means introduction and bugg denotes a fault. In English, related concepts include fault injection, bug injection, and mutation testing.

Applications of buggintroduktion include evaluating debugging workflows, testing coverage, and the effectiveness of monitoring and alerting. It is also used as an educational tool to teach developers and students how to locate, diagnose, and fix defects. In practice, faults may be injected into code paths, data inputs, configuration settings, timing conditions, or resource usage to produce observable failures in a controlled environment.

Implementation practices emphasize safety and governance. Injections are performed in isolated test environments with version control, robust access controls, observability, logging, and the ability to roll back changes quickly. Techniques range from manual fault injection in test harnesses to automated mutation testing and dedicated fault-injection frameworks. Common fault types include null pointer dereferences, exceptions, incorrect calculations, race conditions, and network or I/O failures.

Limitations and risks include potential data loss, service disruption, and unintentional propagation beyond test bounds. Ethical and legal considerations require explicit authorization, clear objectives, and appropriate safeguards, especially when working within shared or production-like environments.

See also: fault injection, mutation testing, chaos engineering, software testing, defect management.