A technique for fault tolerance assessment of COTS based systems

This paper investigates the feasibility of emulating source code software faults directly in Java byte code. Experimental results show that software defects introduced in source code can be emulated in Java byte code with a high level of confidence. This makes it possible to validate the dependability of Java programs with respect to realistic software defects embedded within the COTS components used without the need to know the source code, It is first investigated with good results how well the fault locations found at the byte code level map to the source code. The behaviors of the byte code level mutants are then compared with the corresponding source code mutant behavior. In a back-to-back comparative study with mutants based on ten representative programming defects, no difference in the program behavior between source and byte code level mutants could be distinguished.