Software Implemented Fault Injection Used for Software Evaluation

Abstract: It is the sad truth that no matter how good a programmer you are all software systems will contain faults and be exposed to faults from the environment! Therefore, an important aspect of any software component is how resilient it is to faults. The concept of using software implemented fault injection (SWIFI) for software component evaluation seems very appealing. There are however many questions that needs to be resolved before any real use of such a technique can be gained. Questions like what type of faults that arise in real systems and how to emulate them in software must be answered. Is the system at all suitable for testing with SWIFI? What impact does the tool have on the experiment and impact does the workload have? In this paper some of the more important questions are discussed and references are given to previous work done in the corresponding area. Several examples of existing tools are presented and parallels are drawn to the technique presented in the book, IPA, interface propagation analysis.