  It is essential that software systems be tolerant to degradations in
components they rely on. There are patterns and techniques which software
engineers use to ensure their systems gracefully degrade. Despite these
techniques being available in practice, tuning and configuration is hard to get
right and it is expensive to explore possible changes to components and
techniques in complex systems. To fill these gaps, we propose Quartermaster to
model and simulate systems and fault-tolerant techniques. We anticipate that
Quartermaster will be useful to further research on graceful degradation and
help inform software engineers about techniques that are most appropriate for
their use cases.
