A software fault insertion testing methodology for improving the robustness of telecommunications systems

Abstract

Testing fault tolerance of a telecommunications system is difficult due to the size and complexity of the software. This paper proposes a software fault insertion testing (SFIT) methodology. Those logical system components responsible for fault handling and service provision are defined as the fault manager and service manager, respectively. SFIT is a technique that tests a system's fault tolerance by injecting software faults into the service manager and observing the behavior in the fault manager. Our experiences and lessons learned in SFIT for various telecommunications systems are also discussed in this paper.<>