Mutation-like oriented diversity for dependability improvement: A distributed system case study

Abstract

Achieving higher levels of dependability is a goal in any software project, therefore strategies for software reliability improvement are very attractive. This work introduces a new technique for reliability and maintainability improvement in object-oriented systems. The technique uses code mutation to generate diverse versions of a set of classes, and fault tolerance approaches to glue the versions together. The main advantages of the technique are the increase of reliability, and the proposed scheme for automatic generation of diverse classes. The technique is applied to a distributed application which uses CORBA and RMI. First results show promising conclusions. © Springer-Verlag 2004.