Fault Injection Techniques - A Brief Review

SOFTWARE TESTING is the examination of code and/or execution of a software product/system for purposes that include detecting flaws in the code/logic, measuring the system performance in accordance with certain client-specified benchmarks and criteria, sealing of potential unintended loopholes, and enhancing the degree of user-friendliness. Of its three general strategies - Black-Box (overall skimming of software execution), White-Box (in-depth code analysis), and Grey-Box (combination of the former two) - FAULT INJECTION comes majorly under White-Box Testing, though also referred to by some as a Grey-Box strategy. Most commercial fault injection tools include MODIFI, FERRARI, Xception, and GridFIT. This paper discusses, in brief, two simulation-based fault injection techniques - Chaos Engineering and Virtual-Machine based Fault Injection.