Both proprietary and open source development tends to have more developers than testers. As a result, automated testing has become increasingly common. In the last year, fuzzing — testing with dummy or random data — has become particularly widespread, and its popularity seems likely to continue.
Fuzzing’s name is newer than the concept itself. Computer scientist Gerald Weinberg recalls that when he worked at IBM and Mercury Project in the late 1950s “it was our standard practice to test programs by inputting decks of punch cards taken from the trash. We also used decks of random number punch cards. We weren’t networked in those days, so we weren’t much worried about security, but our random/trash decks often turned up undesirable behavior.
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