System Robustness -- Improves Dependability
Graceful behavior in the presence of exceptional conditions
- Unexpected operating conditions
- Activation of latent design defects
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Robustness definition also includes operation in overloads
- Not in current research, but is set as an eventual goal
- We conjecture overload robustness also hinges on exception handling
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Current test case -- Operating Systems (POSIX API)
- Goal: metric for comparative evaluation of OS robustness
- If a mature OS isn’t “bullet-proof”, what hope is there for application software?