Injecting faults into the kernel vs unit testing

Posted Nov 17, 2006 23:19 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Injecting faults into the kernel by mokki
Parent article: Injecting faults into the kernel

I think the main value of this fault injection over unit testing is cost. It takes a significant amount of time and boredom to write scaffolding for a module of the kernel, but a complete scaffold already exists -- the rest of the real kernel. All it lacks is the controls to manipulate all the inputs and outputs to get a full test, so fault injection adds a faint whisper of those.

I too agree that unit testing (and modular programming in general) gives a better result. But I understand why people find it not worth the cost.