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A Chaos Engineering System for Live Analysis and Falsification of Exception-Handling in the JVM

Abstract

Software systems contain resilience code to handle those failures and unexpected events happening in production. It is essential for developers to understand and assess the resilience of their systems. Chaos engineering is a technology that aims at assessing resilience and uncovering weaknesses by actively injecting perturbations in production. In this paper, we propose a novel design and implementation of a chaos engineering system in Java called ChaosMachine . It provides a unique and actionable analysis on exception-handling capabilities in production, at the level of try-catch blocks. To evaluate our approach, we have deployed ChaosMachine on top of 3 large-scale and well-known Java applications totaling 630k lines of code. Our results show that ChaosMachine reveals both strengths and weaknesses of the resilience code of a software system at the level of exception handling.

Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

  • Long Zhang
  • Brice Morin
  • Philipp Haller
  • Benoit Baudry
  • Martin Monperrus

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Sustainable Communication Technologies
  • Royal Institute of Technology

Year

2021

Published in

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

ISSN

0098-5589

Volume

47

Issue

11

Page(s)

2534 - 2548

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository