Software Fairness Testing in Practice

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Santos, Ronnie de Souza, Leca, Matheus de Morais, Santos, Reydne, Magalhaes, Cleyton
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866912503734206464
author Santos, Ronnie de Souza
Leca, Matheus de Morais
Santos, Reydne
Magalhaes, Cleyton
author_facet Santos, Ronnie de Souza
Leca, Matheus de Morais
Santos, Reydne
Magalhaes, Cleyton
contents Software testing ensures that a system functions correctly, meets specified requirements, and maintains high quality. As artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) technologies become integral to software systems, testing has evolved to address their unique complexities. A critical advancement in this space is fairness testing, which identifies and mitigates biases in AI applications to promote ethical and equitable outcomes. Despite extensive academic research on fairness testing, including test input generation, test oracle identification, and component testing, practical adoption remains limited. Industry practitioners often lack clear guidelines and effective tools to integrate fairness testing into real-world AI development. This study investigates how software professionals test AI-powered systems for fairness through interviews with 22 practitioners working on AI and ML projects. Our findings highlight a significant gap between theoretical fairness concepts and industry practice. While fairness definitions continue to evolve, they remain difficult for practitioners to interpret and apply. The absence of industry-aligned fairness testing tools further complicates adoption, necessitating research into practical, accessible solutions. Key challenges include data quality and diversity, time constraints, defining effective metrics, and ensuring model interoperability. These insights emphasize the need to bridge academic advancements with actionable strategies and tools, enabling practitioners to systematically address fairness in AI systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Software Fairness Testing in Practice
Santos, Ronnie de Souza
Leca, Matheus de Morais
Santos, Reydne
Magalhaes, Cleyton
Software Engineering
Software testing ensures that a system functions correctly, meets specified requirements, and maintains high quality. As artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) technologies become integral to software systems, testing has evolved to address their unique complexities. A critical advancement in this space is fairness testing, which identifies and mitigates biases in AI applications to promote ethical and equitable outcomes. Despite extensive academic research on fairness testing, including test input generation, test oracle identification, and component testing, practical adoption remains limited. Industry practitioners often lack clear guidelines and effective tools to integrate fairness testing into real-world AI development. This study investigates how software professionals test AI-powered systems for fairness through interviews with 22 practitioners working on AI and ML projects. Our findings highlight a significant gap between theoretical fairness concepts and industry practice. While fairness definitions continue to evolve, they remain difficult for practitioners to interpret and apply. The absence of industry-aligned fairness testing tools further complicates adoption, necessitating research into practical, accessible solutions. Key challenges include data quality and diversity, time constraints, defining effective metrics, and ensuring model interoperability. These insights emphasize the need to bridge academic advancements with actionable strategies and tools, enabling practitioners to systematically address fairness in AI systems.
title Software Fairness Testing in Practice
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17095