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Automated robustness testing of off-the-shelf software components
Abstract
Mission-critical system designers may have to use a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) approach to reduce costs and shorten development time, even though COTS software components may not specifically be designed for robust operation. Automated testing can assess component robustness without sacrificing the advantages of a COTS approach. This paper describes the Ballista methodology for scalable, portable, automated robustness testing of component interfaces. An object-oriented approach based on parameter data types rather than component functionality essentially eliminates the need for function-specific test scaffolding. A full-scale implementation that automatically tests the robustness of 233 operating system software components has been ported to ten POSIX systems. Between 42% and 63% of components tested had robustness problems, with a normalized failure rate ranging from 10% to 23% of tests conducted. Robustness testing could be used by developers to measure and improve robustness, or by consumers to compare the robustness of competing COTS component libraries.
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Citations
Cited by
JCrasher: an automatic robustness tester for Java
Csallner, C., & Smaragdakis, Y. (2004) · Software: Practice and Experience · doi:10.1002/spe.602 · Cited by 426
Combination testing strategies: a survey
Grindal, M., Offutt, J., & Andler, S. F. (2005) · Software Testing, Verification and Reliability · doi:10.1002/stvr.319 · Cited by 425
TensorFI: A Flexible Fault Injection Framework for TensorFlow Applications
Chen, Z., Narayanan, N., Fang, B., Li, G., Pattabiraman, K., & DeBardeleben, N. (2020) · 2020 IEEE 31st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) · doi:10.1109/issre5003.2020.00047 · Cited by 93
Metadata
- Authors
- Kropp, N. P., Koopman, P. J., & Siewiorek, D. P.
- Venue
- Digest of Papers. Twenty-Eighth Annual International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (Cat. No.98CB36224)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 1998
- Pages
- 230-239
- OpenAlex
- W2123482495
- Cited by
- 183
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 5.41
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Automated robustness testing of off-the-shelf software components. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/ftcs.1998.689474
- The paper
- Kropp, N. P., Koopman, P. J., & Siewiorek, D. P. (1998). Automated robustness testing of off-the-shelf software components. Digest of Papers. Twenty-Eighth Annual International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing (Cat. No.98CB36224). https://doi.org/10.1109/ftcs.1998.689474
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