Fault Injection based Analysis of Defect Amplification Index in Technology Variant Commercial Software Application Development

Fault injection involves the deliberate insertion of faults or errors into software in order to determine its response and to study its behaviour. Fault Injection Experiments have proven to be an effective method for measuring and studying response of defects, validating fault-tolerant systems, and observing how systems behave in the presence of faults. This approach can offer both accuracy of fault injection results transparency of the system dynamics in the presence of faults. The objectives of this study are to measure and study defect leakage, analyse amplification of errors and study “Domino” effect of defects leaked. The approach for fault injection patterns presented in this research is validated by two approaches taken to arrive at the Amplification Index (AI) that represents the effect caused by defects in subsequent phases of software development in business applications. The approaches endeavour to demonstrate the phasewise impact of leaked defects, through statistical analysis of defects leakage and amplification patterns of systems, built using technology (C#, VB 6.0, Java) variants, and also through a causal analysis done on the defects injected.