Enhancing Fault Injection Testing of Service Systems via Fault-Tolerance Bottleneck

• Published in: IEEE transactions on software engineering Vol. 49; no. 8; pp. 4097 - 4114
• Main Authors: Wu, Huayao, Yu, Senyao, Niu, Xintao, Nie, Changhai, Pei, Yu, He, Qiang, Yang, Yun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2023; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Behavioral sciences; Benchmark testing; Business; Fault injection testing; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; fault-tolerance bottleneck; Redundancy; redundant component; Redundant components; service system; Software; System effectiveness; Task analysis
• ISSN: 0098-5589; 1939-3520
• DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2023.3285357

Modern large-scale service systems are usually deployed with redundant components to ensure high dependability in distributed and volatile environments. Fault Injection Testing (FIT) is a popular technique for testing such systems, while the application of FIT to validating the correctness of redundant components remains a challenging task, especially when the system's structural information is unavailable when testing starts. In this study, we refer to a minimum set of faults that, when injected, will cut off all execution paths in a service system as a fault-tolerance bottleneck , and we propose a novel Fault-tolerance Bottleneck driven Fault Injection (FBFI) approach to the exploration and validation of redundant components without prior knowledge of the system's business structure. The core idea of FBFI is to iteratively infer and inject bottlenecks of the business structure constructed so far. In this way, FBFI is able to discover and test redundant components by repeatedly triggering new system behaviors. The effectiveness and efficiency of FBFI is evaluated using two microservice benchmark systems with different deployment scales. The results reveal that FBFI is more practical and cost-effective than random and lineage-driven FIT approaches in testing service systems of high redundancy levels.