Explaining the absence of side-effect and invalid merge-patch faults

Determine whether the failure to detect Side-Effects Failed Modification and Invalid Merge-Patch faults in the Web Fuzzing Commons APIs is caused by inadequate fault-detection techniques or by the absence of such faults in those APIs.

Background

The empirical study reports that the proposed techniques detected seven of the nine fault categories across the 36 APIs in the Web Fuzzing Commons corpus. No Side-Effects Failed Modification or Invalid Merge-Patch faults were found. The authors state that they cannot determine whether this result reflects limitations of the techniques or simply the absence of these fault types in the examined APIs, leaving the cause unresolved.

References

It might be that our techniques are not good enough to find these types of faults in these APIs, or simple there is no fault of such types in those APIs. We cannot know for sure.

— Validating HTTP Semantics in REST APIs With Constructed Call Sequence Scenarios  (2608.16239 - Sahin et al., 17 Aug 2026) in Section 4, Empirical Study, subsection Empirical Results