Fault Factory is a useful and unique active debugging solution for applications which communicate with other applications over the network (active debugging is a technique where the error condition is induced on purpose, then its effects are traced). It utilizes Fault Injection technique to imitate faults and exercise error-handling code.

Basics
Your code may be calling a method that can return an error or throw an exception under some circumstances. The set of circumstances that generate the error condition may be rare, and it may be difficult to encounter during product development, but nevertheless error conditions do occur during the real-life use of your application, and therefore need to be tested

For example, you may periodically get ENOBUF error from many socket calls, even under normal use. Or you may sometimes receive ECONNABORTED or ENETDOWN. It may be very difficult to reproduce those conditions without Fault Factory, but your code should be ready to receive them at any moment...

Fault Factory injects two types of faults: socket API failures and arbitrary HTTP responses (that can be used to imitate a wide range of conditions, including SOAP faults)

It is meant to be used standalone, or in combination with your existing debugger.

Here are some key features of "FaultFactory":

· Very safe and easy-to-use
· No system configuration changes needed
· No build-time instrumentation needed - uses dynamic instrumentation
· Language-neutral - works with virtually any winsock application, written in C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, and pretty much any other language
· Does not modify your system and therefore very safe