Capturing the Human Component of Dependability in a ...

Submitted to the 2002 DSN Workshop on Dependability Benchmarking
Capturing the Human Component of Dependability in a
Dependability Benchmark
Aaron B. Brown, Leonard C. Chung, and David A. Patterson
Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley
387 Soda Hall #1776, Berkeley, CA 94720-1776, USA
{abrown,leonardc,pattrsn}@cs.berkeley.edu
Abstract
Motivated by the observation that a system’s dependability is significantly influenced by
the behavior of its human operators, we describe the construction of a dependability
benchmark that captures the impact of the human system operator on the tested system.
Our benchmark follows the usual model of injecting faults and perturbations into the
tested system; however, our perturbations are generated by the unscripted actions of
actual human operators participating in the benchmark procedure in addition to more tra-
ditional fault injection. We introduce the issues that arise as we attempt to incorporate
human behavior into a dependability benchmark and describe the possible solutions that
we have arrived at through preliminary experimentation. Finally, we describe the imple-
mentation of our techniques in a dependability benchmark that we are currently develop-
ing for Internet and corporate e-mail server systems.
Keywords: Dependability benchmarking, human operators, operator error, e-mail, fault injection
Submission category: Paper submission
Word count: approx. 5200 words
The material included in this paper has ...