[Journal First] Correctness Attraction: A Study of Stability of Software Behavior Under Runtime Perturbation

Can the execution of software be perturbed without breaking the correctness of the output? In this paper, we devise a protocol to answer this question from a novel perspective. In an experimental study, we observe that many perturbations do not break the correctness in ten subject programs. We call this phenomenon "correctness attraction". The uniqueness of this protocol is that it considers a systematic exploration of the perturbation space as well as perfect oracles to determine the correctness of the output. To this extent, our findings on the stability of software under execution perturbations have a level of validity that has never been reported before in the scarce related work. A qualitative manual analysis enables us to set up the first taxonomy ever of the reasons behind correctness attraction.