Stochastic bisection
Channel: SUSE Labs
Date: 2022-10-24

by Jan Kara at SUSE Labs Conference 2022

Thanks to our conference sponsors, ARM and HPE, and our hosting sponsor and BigBlueButton provider, Blindside Networks.

During Hackweek in December 2021 I have implemented support for stochastic bisection in git. That is a bisection which accommodates the fact that during bisection the decisions about commit being good / bad are not 100% correct. For example if the failure is difficult to reproduce or if you are doing a performance testing and results tend to be noisy. In this session I want to present the model I have picked to mathematically represent the situation, what are the inputs / outputs of the stochastic bisection algorithm, and discuss how it fits people's needs or which improvements could be done to make it more useful.