We present a framework that facilitates synthesis and validation of fail-safe fault-tolerant programs. Starting from a fault-intolerant program, with safety specification SS, that satisfies its specification in the absence of faults, we present an approach that automatically transforms it into a fail-safe fault-tolerant program, through the addition of a class of detectors termed as SS-globally consistent detectors. Further, we make use of the SS-global consistency property of the detectors to generate pertinent test cases for testing the fail-safe fault-tolerant program, or for fault injection purposes. The properties of the resulting fail-safe fault-tolerant program are that (i) it has minimal detection latency, and (ii) perfect error detection. The application area of our framework is in the domain of distributed embedded applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.