A Chaos Engineering System for Live Analysis and Falsification of Exception-Handling in the JVM

Software systems contain resilience code to handle those failures and unexpected events happening in production. It is essential for developers to understand and assess the resilience of their systems. Chaos engineering is a technology that aims at assessing resilience and uncovering weaknesses by actively injecting perturbations in production. In this paper, we propose a novel design and implementation of a chaos engineering system in Java called
ChaosMachine
. It provides a unique and actionable analysis on exception-handling capabilities in production, at the level of try-catch blocks. To evaluate our approach, we have deployed
ChaosMachine
on top of 3 large-scale and well-known Java applications totaling
$630k$
lines of code. Our results show that
ChaosMachine
reveals both strengths and weaknesses of the resilience code of a software system at the level of exception handling.