Ballista Design and Methodology
October 1997
Philip Koopman
Institute for Complex Engineered Systems & ECE
Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Hamershlag Hall D-202
Pittsburgh,
PA 15213
koopman@cmu.edu
Abstract:
This report serves as initial documentation of the design and methodology to
be employed by Ballista, an automatic robustness testing and hardening tool for
Commercial Off-The-Shelf software components. The Ballista architecture includes
the following major components:
- Automatic testing of software modules determines whether they behave
robustly in the face of exceptional inputs.
- Characterization of response regions (behavior when presented exceptional
input values) is performed over the parameter input space. Initial heuristics
for this characterization are presented here.
- Software wrapper routines are created to deflect any exceptional inputs
that would, if uncaught, produce a "crash" or "hang" of the
application software component.
- A World Wide Web interface to users.
Full report 137806 bytes: 
pdf file
Ballista Home Page
koopman@cmu.edu