Fault injection is considered an important tool for evaluating the dependability of computer systems. Faults are injected into the system to study the dependability bottlenecks, to study the S. Bagchi, G. Kar and J. Hellerstein behavior of the system under fault conditions, and evaluate the effectiveness and performance impact of fault tolerance mechanisms, namely, the error detection and recovery mechanisms. Many fault injection tools have been developed both commercially and in universities. The tools may be hardware-based which use additional hardware to introduce faults into the target system’s hardware, or they may be software-based which involve inserting the fault injection module in the application software or the operating system or in the layer between the two.

The Tool developed by CSW is a Software Fault Injection, Xception^TM. (See the Tools section).