Investigation of failure causes in workload-driven reliability testing
Domenico Cotroneo, Roberto Pietrantuono, Leonardo Mariani, Fabrizio Pastore · 2007
Virtual execution environments and middleware are required to be extremely reliable because applications running on top of them are developed assuming their correctness, and platform-level failures can result in serious and unexpected application-level problems. Since software platforms and middleware are often executed for long time without any interruption, large part of the testing process is devoted to investigate their behavior when long and stressful executions occur (these test cases are called workloads). When a problem is identified, software engineers examine log files to find its root cause. Unfortunately, since of the workloads length, log files can contain a huge amount of information and manual analysis is often prohibitive. Thus, de-facto, the identification of the root cause is mostly left to the intuition of the software engineer.