Robustness Testing Techniques and Tools

Abstract

Robustness is an attribute of resilience that measures the behaviour of the system under non-standard conditions. Robustness is defined as the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. As triggering robustness faults could in the worst case scenario even crash the system, detecting this type of faults is of utmost importance. This chapter presents the state of the art on robustness testing by summarizing the evolution of basic robustness testing techniques, giving an overview of the specific methods and tools developed for major application domains, and introducing penetration testing, a specialization of robustness testing, which searches for security vulnerabilities. Finally, the use of testing results in resilience modelling and analysis is discussed.