J-SWFIT: A Java Software Fault Injection Tool

Abstract

Software faults are known as a major cause of computational systems' defects. Even when these systems are tested exhaustively they can present some failures due to the activation of residual software faults in the source code. Software fault injection tools are useful to emulate the presence of software faults and to monitor the system allowing one to observe if the system continues to operate as expected. A tool helps to evaluate the possible failures in order to define countermeasures to avoid them or to reduce their severity, increasing the levels of dependability of the application under test. This work presents the J-SWFIT tool, which emulates Java software faults directly in compiled code. The architecture of the tool was proposed in an abstract level that can be easily understood and extended. J-SWFIT works based on a set of predefined Java operators and consists of analyzing the byte codes of compiled Java files, finding locations where specific faults can exist and can be injected each one independently. J-SWFIT allows comparing the systems' behavior in the presence and absence of each fault.