Error injection aimed at fault removal in fault tolerance mechanisms-criteria for error selection using field data on software faults

Christmansson, J.; Santhanam, P.

doi:10.1109/issre.1996.558785

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…In the last decade, a framework has been formulated for rigorous evaluation of computer systems with emphasis on software faults, namely dependability benchmarking, which has been used for comparisons between systems and for risk assessment [5,13]. Fault injection has also been used for fault removal in fault tolerance mechanisms [3,21].…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Assessing and improving the effectiveness of logs for the analysis of software faults

Cinque

Cotroneo

Natella

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems &Amp; Networks (DSN)

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Event logs are the primary source of data to characterize the dependability behavior of a computing system during the operational phase. However, they are inadequate to provide evidence of software faults, which are nowadays among the main causes of system outages. This paper proposes an approach based on software fault injection to assess the effectiveness of logs to keep track of software faults triggered in the field. Injection results are used to provide guidelines to improve the ability of logging mechanisms to report the effects of software faults. The benefits of the approach are shown by means of experimental results on three widely used software systems.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 3 shows the Apache configuration adopted in this work. Apache Web Server 3 2) depicts the number of injected faults resulting in a failure outcome. For failure outcomes, we further investigate Apache logfiles to identify the presence of log entries (two rightmost columns of Table 2).…”

Section: Apache Web Servermentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing and improving the effectiveness of logs for the analysis of software faults

Cinque

Cotroneo

Natella

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems &Amp; Networks (DSN)

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“…Second, injection of faults and errors in memory at arbitrary time does not reflect the characteristics of software faults, which are permanent design/implementation faults into the source code. [13], [21] Subsequent works pursued error injection by (i) designing a formal framework for error injection experiments, (ii) corrupting the memory state using a realistic error model, and (iii) triggering error injection every time that a target sourcecode statement (supposed to be faulty) is executed [9], [12], [22]. Error injection techniques are convenient in terms of time and efforts devoted to experiments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, FTMs in critical systems have to undertake a thorough assessment before acceptance, which can be achieved by means of Software Fault Injection (SFI). By deliberate injection of software faults, fault tolerance can be tested and potentially improved [9], [10]; SFI is also useful to assess the impact of software faults on the system during the operational phase [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emulation of Transient Software Faults for Dependability Assessment: A Case Study

Natella

Cotroneo

2010

2010 European Dependable Computing Conference

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Fault Tolerance Mechanisms (FTMs) are extensively used in software systems to counteract software faults, in particular against faults that manifest transiently, namely Mandelbugs. In this scenario, Software Fault Injection (SFI) plays a key role for the verification and the improvement of FTMs. However, no previous work investigated whether SFI techniques are able to emulate Mandelbugs adequately. This is an important concern for assessing critical systems, since Mandelbugs are a major cause of failures, and FTMs are specifically tailored for this class of software faults.In this paper, we analyze an existing state-of-the-art SFI technique, namely G-SWFIT, in the context of a real-world fault-tolerant system for Air Traffic Control (ATC). The analysis highlights limitations of G-SWFIT regarding its ability to emulate the transient nature of Mandelbugs, because most of injected faults are activated in the early phase of execution, and they deterministically affect process replicas in the system. We also notice that G-SWFIT leaves untested the 35% of states of the considered system. Moreover, by means of an experiment, we show how emulation of Mandelbugs is useful to improve SFI. In particular, we emulate concurrency faults, which are a critical sub-class of Mandelbugs, in a fully representative way. We show that proper fault triggering can increase the confidence in FTMs' testing, since it is possible to reduce the amount of untested states down to 5%.

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“…In [6] is reported that six error types accounted for nearly 80% of the highest severity defects. Nine error types accounted for about 80% of the defects exposed by recovery procedures or exception handlers.…”

Section: % or 22%mentioning

confidence: 99%

A literature survey of the quality economics of defect-detection techniques

Wagner

2006

Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering

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Over the last decades, a considerable amount of empirical knowledge about the efficiency of defect-detection techniques has been accumulated. Also a few surveys have summarised those studies with different focuses, usually for a specific type of technique. This work reviews the results of empirical studies and associates them with a model of software quality economics. This allows a better comparison of the different techniques and supports the application of the model in practice as several parameters can be approximated with typical average values. The main contributions are the provision of average values of several interesting quantities w.r.t. defect detection and the identification of areas that need further research because of the limited knowledge available.

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Error injection aimed at fault removal in fault tolerance mechanisms-criteria for error selection using field data on software faults

Cited by 14 publications

References 19 publications

Assessing and improving the effectiveness of logs for the analysis of software faults

Assessing and improving the effectiveness of logs for the analysis of software faults

Emulation of Transient Software Faults for Dependability Assessment: A Case Study

A literature survey of the quality economics of defect-detection techniques

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