Software testing and software fault injection

Reliability is one of the most important characteristics of the system quality. It is defined as the probability of failure-free operation of system for a specified period of time in a specified environment. For micro-processor based systems, reliability includes both software and hardware reliability. Many methods and techniques have been proposed in the literature so far to evaluate and test both software faults (e.g., Mutation Testing, Control Flow Testing, Data Flow Testing) and hardware faults (e.g. Fault Injection). In this paper, we present a survey of proposed techniques and methods to evaluate software and hardware reliability, and we study the possibility to explore them to evaluate the role of the software stack to evaluate system reliability face to hardware faults.