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Sick But Not Dead Testing - A New Approach to System Test

Authors:
Tara Astigarraga
Lou Dickens
Michael Browne

Keywords: Software Testing; Sick but not Dead; Software Engineering; Partial Failure; Transient Error; Soft Failure; SAN Test; System Test.

Abstract:
Enterprise data center implementations make significant investments in high availability configurations, redundant hardware, software and Input / Output (I/O) paths that are in many failure scenarios quite successful. However, in spite of all that investment clients are still facing unexpected outages and performance impacts related to a phenomenon referred to as Sick but not Dead (SBND) errors. SBND errors are sometimes lumped together in a category with other related errors including transient errors, partial failure scenarios and soft errors. While SBND errors do have many common characteristics with the errors described above, there are key differences and environment impacts which we will explore further in this paper. We will also present new proactive techniques, inject scenarios and methods to identify, characterize and address SBND failures including cross-component impacts and failures.

Pages: 17 to 20

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: November 18, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4316

ISBN: 978-1-61208-233-2

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 18, 2012 to November 23, 2012