An Exceptional Look At Fault Injection

Software Fault Injection: Inoculating Programs Against Errors by Jeffrey M. Voas and Gary McGraw, John Wiley&Sons, New York, ISBN 0-47-1 78387-4,350 pp., $55. Starting from a review of the state of the art in software quality, this bookdevelops a fundamental theme: that the runtime behavior of software systems can only be quantified using dynamic means. By contrast, code inspections-a static techniquecannot do this, although they have become decally conveys the possib es reflected in the authors’ considerable fault injection expertise, yet remains honest about the field’s current limitations. In particular, the discussions of how some injected faults propagate through to a program’s outp don’t really got me thinking.This is exc cause we sti l l don’t know why programs are as reliable as they are given the kind of asymptotic defect densities reported-programs generally seem to be much more reliable than they ought to be.