Generation of an error set that emulates software faults based onfield data
Christmansson, J.; Chillarege, R.
Fault Tolerant Computing, 1996., Proceedings of Annual Symposium on
Volume , Issue , 25-27 Jun 1996 Page(s):304 - 313
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/FTCS.1996.534615
Summary:A significant issue in fault injection experiments is that the
injected faults are representative of software faults observed in the
field. Another important issue is the time used, as we want experiments
to be conducted without excessive time spent waiting for the
consequences of a fault. An approach to accelerate the failure process
would be to inject errors instead of faults, but this would require a
mapping between representative software faults and injectable errors.
Furthermore, it must be assured that the injected errors emulate
software faults and not hardware faults. These issues were addressed in
a study of software faults encountered in one release of a large IBM
operating system product. The key results are: A general procedure that
uses field data to generate a set of injectable errors, in which each
error is defined by: error type, error location and injection condition.
The procedure assures that the injected errors emulate software faults
and not hardware faults. The faults are uniformly distributed (1.37
fault per module) over the affected modules. The distribution of error
categories in the IBM operating system and the distribution of errors in
the Tandem Guardian90 operating system reported previously were compared
and found to be similar. This result adds a flavor of generality to the
field data presented in the current paper
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