Just-in-Time Catching Test Generation at Meta

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Becker, Matthew, Chen, Yifei, Cochran, Nicholas, Ghasemi, Pouyan, Gulati, Abhishek, Harman, Mark, Haluza, Zachary, Honarkhah, Mehrdad, Robert, Herve, Liu, Jiacheng, Liu, Weini, Thummala, Sreeja, Yang, Xiaoning, Xin, Rui, Zeng, Sophie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Becker, Matthew
Chen, Yifei
Cochran, Nicholas
Ghasemi, Pouyan
Gulati, Abhishek
Harman, Mark
Haluza, Zachary
Honarkhah, Mehrdad
Robert, Herve
Liu, Jiacheng
Liu, Weini
Thummala, Sreeja
Yang, Xiaoning
Xin, Rui
Zeng, Sophie
author_facet Becker, Matthew
Chen, Yifei
Cochran, Nicholas
Ghasemi, Pouyan
Gulati, Abhishek
Harman, Mark
Haluza, Zachary
Honarkhah, Mehrdad
Robert, Herve
Liu, Jiacheng
Liu, Weini
Thummala, Sreeja
Yang, Xiaoning
Xin, Rui
Zeng, Sophie
contents We report on Just-in-Time catching test generation at Meta, designed to prevent bugs in large scale backend systems of hundreds of millions of line of code. Unlike traditional hardening tests, which pass at generation time, catching tests are meant to fail, surfacing bugs before code lands. The primary challenge is to reduce development drag from false positive test failures. Analyzing 22,126 generated tests, we show code-change-aware methods improve candidate catch generation 4x over hardening tests and 20x over coincidentally failing tests. To address false positives, we use rule-based and LLM-based assessors. These assessors reduce human review load by 70%. Inferential statistical analysis showed that human-accepted code changes are assessed to have significantly more false positives, while human-rejected changes have significantly more true positives. We reported 41 candidate catches to engineers; 8 were confirmed to be true positives, 4 of which would have led to serious failures had they remained uncaught. Overall, our results show that Just-in-Time catching is scalable, industrially applicable, and that it prevents serious failures from reaching production.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22832
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Just-in-Time Catching Test Generation at Meta
Becker, Matthew
Chen, Yifei
Cochran, Nicholas
Ghasemi, Pouyan
Gulati, Abhishek
Harman, Mark
Haluza, Zachary
Honarkhah, Mehrdad
Robert, Herve
Liu, Jiacheng
Liu, Weini
Thummala, Sreeja
Yang, Xiaoning
Xin, Rui
Zeng, Sophie
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
We report on Just-in-Time catching test generation at Meta, designed to prevent bugs in large scale backend systems of hundreds of millions of line of code. Unlike traditional hardening tests, which pass at generation time, catching tests are meant to fail, surfacing bugs before code lands. The primary challenge is to reduce development drag from false positive test failures. Analyzing 22,126 generated tests, we show code-change-aware methods improve candidate catch generation 4x over hardening tests and 20x over coincidentally failing tests. To address false positives, we use rule-based and LLM-based assessors. These assessors reduce human review load by 70%. Inferential statistical analysis showed that human-accepted code changes are assessed to have significantly more false positives, while human-rejected changes have significantly more true positives. We reported 41 candidate catches to engineers; 8 were confirmed to be true positives, 4 of which would have led to serious failures had they remained uncaught. Overall, our results show that Just-in-Time catching is scalable, industrially applicable, and that it prevents serious failures from reaching production.
title Just-in-Time Catching Test Generation at Meta
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22832