A Method to Support Fault Tolerance Design in Service Oriented Computing Systems

Service Oriented Computing relies on the integration of heterogeneous software technologies and infrastructures that provide developers with a common ground for composing services and producing applications flexibly. However, this approach eases software development but makes dependability a big challenge. Integrating such diverse software items raise issues that traditional testing is not able to exhaustively cope with. In this context, tolerating faults, rather than attempt to detect them solely by testing, is a more suitable solution. This paper proposes a method to support a tailored design of fault tolerance actions for the system being developed. This paper describes system failure behavior through an extensive fault injection campaign to figure out its criticalities and adopt the most appropriate countermeasures to tolerate operational faults. The proposed method is applied to two distinct SOC-enabling technologies. Results show how the achieved findings allow designers to understand the system failure behavior and plan fault tolerance.