A Chaos Engineering System for Live Analysis and Falsification of Exception-handling in the JVM
This provides a tool for developers to evaluate and improve the resilience of Java applications, though it is incremental as it applies chaos engineering specifically to exception-handling.
The authors tackled the problem of assessing software resilience by developing ChaosMachine, a chaos engineering system for Java that analyzes exception-handling at the try-catch block level in production, and deployed it on three large-scale applications totaling 630k lines of code to reveal strengths and weaknesses.
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.