Fault injection stress strategies in dependability analysis

The paper deals with the problem of testing computer system’s susceptibility to hardware faults by means of software implemented fault injectors. Basing on our experience with fault injection techniques we present various strategies of fault stressing in relevance to fault impact analysis in the function of the application input data profile, fault injection profile in time and space, resource activities etc. We discuss the problem of test result qualification and significance. Fault hardening at the software level is also outlined. The considerations presented are illustrated with numerous experimental results obtained in Windows and Linux environments.