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From: shimeall@cs.nps.navy.mil (Tim Shimeall x2509)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Software Failure Analysis
Summary: Try software testing/fault tolerance literature
Keywords: Software failure analysis
Message-ID: <290@cs.nps.navy.mil>
Date: 26 Sep 89 00:28:10 GMT
References: <10743@dasys1.UUCP> <34348@regenmeister.uucp> <592@halley.UUCP>
Reply-To: shimeall@cs.nps.navy.mil (Tim Shimeall x2509)
Organization: Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA
Lines: 55

In article <592@halley.UUCP> joannz@halley.UUCP (Joann Zimmerman) writes:
>One other very noticeable difference between other engineering fields and
>computing is in the amount of failure analysis to be found in the field. Did
>anybody reading this EVER take a course in failure analysis of software? In
>fact, where's the literature on this? 

There have been a number of empirical studies on software failures and
on the faults that cause software to fail.  Principally these have
been published as software testing or software fault tolerance
studies.  See (for just a few examples):

P.E. Ammann, and J.C. Knight, ``Data Diversity: An approach to
Software Fault Tolerance'', _IEEE_Transactions_on_Computers_,
April 1988, pp. 418--425.

V.R. Basili and R.W. Selby, ``Comparing the Effectiveness of
Software Testing Strategies'', _IEEE_Transactions_on_Software_Engineering_,
Vol. SE-13, No. 12, December 1987, pp. 1278--1296.

S.S. Brilliant, _Testing_Software_Using_Multiple_Versions_,
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA,
September 1987.

W.C. Hetzel, _An_Experimental_Analysis_of_Program_Verification_Methods_,
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976.

J.C. Knight and N.G. Leveson, ``Experimental Evaluation of the
Assumption of Independence in Multi-Version Programming,'' 
_IEEE_Transactions_on_Software_Engineering_, January 1986, pp. 96--109.

J.C. Knight and N.G. Leveson, ``An Empirical Study of Failure
Probabilities in Multi-Version Software,'' 
_Sixteenth_International_Symposium_on_Fault-Tolerant_Computing_, 
Vienna, Austria, July 1986, pp. 165--170.

and don't forget :-)
T.J. Shimeall, _An_Experiment_in_Software_Fault_Tolerance_and_
Fault_Elimination_, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California,
Irvine, 1989.

There have also been a number of testing works on the theory of "fault
based testing" that deal with the issue of how software fails.  See,
for example:

Richardson, Debra J., and Thompson, Margaret C., ``The RELAY Model of
Error Detection and its Application'', _Proceedings_of_the_Second_
Workshop_on_Software_Testing,_Verification_and_Analysis_, Banff, Alberta,
July 1988, pp. 223--230.

This paper also has references to some of the other fault-based
testing work.

All-in-all there has been a fair amount written, and in major research
journals and conference, about how software failure analysis.  
It just hasn't been called by that term.