Interface fault injection

Method Purpose Short description of the method's purpose and main benefits

Method description A detailed description of the method

Interface fault injection (or robustness testing) requires that the system/component under test faces erroneous input conditions, which are usually defined based on typical developer mistakes or wrong assumptions. Erroneous input conditions can be also generated at random in some robustness testing scenarios. In a more general fault injection context, erroneous inputs injected at the interface of a given component can represent failures in preceding components that forward their erroneous outputs to the target component.

Information regarding the system interface (e.g., a WSDL document in case of SOAP [IFI3] web services, or an OpenAPI document in case of REST services) is normally used as input for the generation of the set of invalid inputs, which are combined with valid parameters and sent in requests to the system under test [IFI4]. Examples of invalid parameters are cases null, empty, and boundary values, strings in special formats, or even malicious values. System responses are inspected for suspicious cases of failure (e.g., the presence of exceptions in the response or, response codes referring to internal server errors) and should be analysed regarding their severity.

Method Strengths A listof the strengths of the method

Current approaches are the result of years of research; thus, they are mature and potentially allow for easy application to specific systems.
Low effort required for the generation of robustness test cases, due to a black-box approach and the automatic generation of test cases
Easiness of use and integration in current tools, due to a black-box approach and just requiring adapting existing tools to pass valid and invalid inputs to the interface

Method Limitations The limitations of the method

Classification of results is highly dependent on expert knowledge
The quality of generated workloads by tools often limits the disclosure of robustness problems

Method References Bibliography references to papers about the method.

[IFI1] N. Laranjeiro, M. Vieira and H. Madeira, "Experimental Robustness Evaluation of JMS Middleware," 2008 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, Honolulu, HI, 2008, pp. 119-126, doi: 10.1109/SCC.2008.129.
[IFI2] J. Cámara, R. de Lemos, N. Laranjeiro, R. Ventura and M. Vieira, "Robustness-Driven Resilience Evaluation of Self-Adaptive Software Systems," in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 50-64, 1 Jan.-Feb. 2017, doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2015.2429128.
[IFI3] N. Laranjeiro, M. Vieira, & H. Madeira, A robustness testing approach for SOAP Web services. J Internet Serv Appl 3, 215–232 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13174-012-0062-2
[IFI4] N. Laranjeiro, M. Vieira and H. Madeira, "A Technique for Deploying Robust Web Services," in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 68-81, Jan.-March 2014, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2012.39.

Method Dimensions

Evaluation Environment Type Type of environment where the method is applied. It can be more than one type of environment. (Dimension 1)

Evaluation Type Type of evaluation performed with that method. If a method is hybrid, more than one type can be selected. (Dimension 2)

Type of Component Under Evaluation Type of components that can be evaluated with that method. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 3)

Evaluation Stage The evaluation stage where the method is used. (Dimension 5)

Purpose of the Component Under Evaluation The type of purpose that can be evaluated by a method. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 6)

Type of Requirement Under Evaluation The type of requirements that a method is able to evaluate. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 7)

Evaluation Performance Indicator The type of evaluation criteria or KPI that a method is able to improve. It can be more than one type. (Dimension 8)

Relations

Related Methods A method could be related to other methods.

Tools A method can use zero or more tools.

Part Method A method (when it is a combination: Combination of method artefact that is a specialization of a V&V Method) could be composed of a set of V&V Methods.

Test Case or Verification and Validation activity Test Case or V&V activity performed in a Use Case. We will link to the method to the test cases where the method is used.

Standards A method can be linked with standards.

Context

Workflow

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