On the Extension of Xception to Support Software Fault Models

Software faults are recognized as the major cause of system outages. The two possible approaches to overcome this problem are fault avoidance and fault tolerance. Quality assurance techniques fail to attain the zero defects mark, making fault tolerance vital to assure mission and business critical systems dependability. One major issue is the difficulty in the verification and validation of software fault tolerance modules. This is where software fault injection comes in. We propose the extension of the Xception [3] SWIFI (Software Implemented Fault Injection) tool to emulate software faults. Xception was designed to emulate hardware faults, but recent studies ([1] and [4]) showed promising results in applying the same technology on the emulation of software faults.