Fault Injection for Performance Testing of Composite Web Services

Abstract

Fault injection has already been used to access the dependability of web services. However, most of the existing work focuses on how to inject faults. Problems such as where to inject faults and what faults should be injected still have not been systematically studied in literature, especially for the testing of performance related issues in composite web services. This paper presents an approach that defines coverage criteria to guide fault injection testing of performance related issues in composite web services. We generate fault injection configurations that follows the defined test criteria for systematic fault injection. The configurations specify where to inject faults and what faults should be injected, and the injected faults (e.g. message delays) are generated according to the characteristics of each individual sub-service in order to make the faults more realistic. With the fault injection configurations, the fault injection process can be automatically conducted and the performance of a composite service can be effectively evaluated.

Handling Faults in Service Oriented Computing: A Comprehensive Study

“…Fault injection is the process of injecting faults to the application to test its reliability and performance by trying to detect and remove such faults [ 35 ]. Qian et al in [ 36 ] presented a fault injection process that counted on the place where faults can be injected and what type of faults can be injected. However, only sub-service stability coverage criterion was considered, in which more coverage criteria were highly required to evaluate the efficiency and reliability of the proposed approach.…”

“…Thus, many studies have used fault injection methods for multiple reasons, as to evaluate and test a system [ 36 , 38 ], to generate representative failure data [ 39 ], to check performance and reliability [ 36 , 37 ], to assess dependability [ 40 ] and for security management [ 41 , 42 ]. Furthermore, fault injection techniques were combined with other fault handling perspectives, as fault tolerance in [ 5 ] to increase the reliability and performance of the system under test.…”