Fault injection in distributed Java applications

In a network consisting of several thousands computers, the occurrence of faults is unavoidable. Being able to test the behaviour of a distributed program in an environment where we can control the faults (such as the crash of a process) is an important feature that matters in the deployment of reliable programs. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of injecting software faults in distributed Java applications. Our scheme is by extending the FAIL-FCI software. It does not require any modification of the source code of the application under test, while retaining the possibility to write high level fault scenarios. As a proof of concept, we use our tool to test FreePastry, an existing Java implementation of a distributed hash table (DHT), against node failures.