Testing the robustness of Windows NT software

To date most studies on the robustness of operat ing system software have focused on Unix based sys tems This paper develops a methodology and ar chitecture for performing intelligent black box analy sis of software that runs on the Windows NT plat form The goals of the research are three fold rst to develop intelligent robustness testing techniques for Commercial O The Shelf COTS software second to benchmark the robustness of NT software in han dling anomalous events and nally to identify ro bustness gaps to permit forti cation for fault tolerance The Random and Intelligent Data Design Library En vironment RIDDLE is a tool for analyzing operat ing system software system utilities desktop appli cations component based software and network ser vices RIDDLE was used to assess the robustness of native Windows NT system utilities as well as Win ports of the GNU utilities Experimental results com paring the relative performance of the ported utilities versus the native utilities are presented