Stress testing software to determine fault tolerance for hardware failure and anomalies

Today's military systems rely for their performance on combinations of hardware and software. While testing of hardware performance during design, development and operation is well understood, the testing of software is less mature. In particular, the effect of hardware failures in the field on software performance, and therefore systems performance, is all-too-often overlooked or is tested in a far less rigorous manner that that applied to Hardware failures alone. Numerous examples exist of major system failures driven by software anomalies but triggered by Hardware failures, with consequences that range from degraded mission performance to weapons system destruction and operator fatalities.