[erlang-questions] Email Interview On Inserting Faults into Erlang Programs At Run Time

[Hoat Do]

Dear Erlang programmer,

We are two BSc thesis students, studying Software Engineering and 
Management at the IT University of Gothenburg Sweden. We are currently 
conducting a research study on the use of fault injection technique 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_injection) for evaluating Erlang 
software testing tools. This approach works by inserting faults into 
Erlang programs, and evaluating testing tools by checking if they can 
detect the fault or not.

This study will involve finding out what typical faults exist in Erlang 
programs, and how they can be injected into such programs. We have been 
going through Erlang/OTP releases (R10B-0 
<http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_R10B-0.readme> - R13 
<http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_R13A.readme>A) and other Erlang 
sources to find out what faults have been detected over the years. We 
need your help in finding out how these faults can be injected into 
Erlang programs at run time. Any idea on how this can be done will be 
highly appreciated.

Below are some Erlang faults^1 :

*API mismatches*
Calling the wrong function/using the wrong arguments
 
*Race conditions*
Two parallel processes trying to do something incompatible, e.g. one 
deleting and the other reading a table object
 
*Wrong context (process)*
Executing in the wrong context, e.g. trying to read from a table that 
only exists on another Process
 
We hope to receive your reply on or before May 8^th . You can send your 
response or any enquiry to Taiwo on ajakaiye@REDACTED 
<mailto:ajakaiye@REDACTED> or Hoat on quangd@REDACTED 
<mailto:quangd@REDACTED>. The result of the study will be published on 
Gothenburg University library, and will be available to the public.
 
Thanks in advance for your response,

Ajakaiye Taiwo Dayo and Quang Hoat Do

/IT University of Göteborg/
/Software Engineering and Management/
/Gothenburg, Sweden/
/ /
/ /
^1 Mats Cronqvist, 2004, Troubleshooting a Large Erlang System, 
Erlang'04, ACM New York, NY, USA.
 
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