Reproducibility of environment-dependent software failures: An experience report

We investigate the dependence of software failure reproducibility on the environment in which the software is executed. The existence of such dependence is ascertained in literature, but so far it is not fully characterized. In this paper we pinpoint some of the environmental components that can affect the reproducibility of a failure and show this influence through an experimental campaign conducted on the MySQL Server software system. The set of failures of interest is drawn from MySQL’s failure reports database and an experiment is designed for each of these failures. The experiments expose the influence of disk usage and level of concurrency on MySQL failure reproducibility. Furthermore, the results show that high levels of usage of these factors increase the probabilities of failure reproducibility.