The AIDA Project recently published a new paper, primarily focused on software fault injection techniques in Python applications. 

“Injecting software faults in Python applications”, a paper carried out by Henrique Marques, Nuno Laranjeiro and Jorge Bernardino, under the scope of AIDA’S project, was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. 

 The paper introduces FIT4Python, which is a tool focused on injection software faults in Python code and then used to analyze the effectiveness of OpenStack’s test suite against feasible software faults.

According to the contributors, they use the tool to “emulate the presence of new faults in Nova Compute API to understand how well OpenStack’s battery of unit, functional, and integration tests cover these new, but probable, situations.” The researchers also added that “results show clear limitations in the effectiveness of OpenStack developers’ test suites, with many cases of injected faults passing undetected through all three types of tests”. In this sense, almost half of the analyzed problems could be detected with additions or changes to the unit tests. 

Read the full paper here.