The SESAME Experience: from Assembly Languages to Declarative Models

SESAME (Software Environment for Software Analysis by Mutation Effects) is a fault injection tool using mutation as the target fault model. It has been used for 15 years to support dependability research at LAAS-CNRS. A salient feature of SESAME is that it is multi-language. This made it possible to inject faults into software written in assembly languages, procedural languages (Pascal, C), a data-flow language (LUSTRE), as well as in a declarative language for temporal planning in robotics. This paper provides an overview of the tool, and reports on its use in experimental research addressing either fault removal or fault tolerance topics.