Abstract
We report the results of a survey about the software faults encountered during the testing phases in evolving a large real-time system. The survey was done in two parts: the first part surveyed all the faults that were reported and characterized them in terms of general categories; the second part resurveyed in depth the faults found in the design and coding phases. For the first part, we describe describe the questionaire, report the general faults found, and characterize the requirements, design and coding faults by the testing phases in which they were found and by the time they were found during the testing interval. For the second part, we describe the questionaire used to survey the design and coding faults, report the faults that occurred, how difficult they were to find and fix, what their underlying causes were (that is, what their corresponding errors were), and what means might have prevented them from occurring. We then characterize the results in terms of interface and implementation faults.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Basili, Victor R., Hutchens, David H.: An Empirical Study of a Syntactic Complexity Family IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-9:6 (November 1983) 664–672
Basili, Victor R., Perricone, Barry T.: Software Errors and Complexity: an Empirical Investigation. Communications of the ACM 27:1 (January 1984) 42–52
Basili, Victor R., Weiss, David M.: A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-10:6 (November 1984) 728–738
Boehm, Barry W.: Software Engineering Economics. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981
Bowen John B.: Standard Error Classification to Support Software Reliability Assessment. AFIPS Conference Proceedings, 1980 National Computer Conference (1980) 697–705
Curtis, Bill, Krasner, Herb, Iscoe, Neil: A Field Study of the Software Design Process for Large Systems. Communications of the ACM 31:11 (November 1988) 1268–1287
Endres, Albert: An Analysis of Errors and Their Causes in System Programs. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-1:2 (June 1975) 140–149
Glass, Robert L.: Persistent Software Errors. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-7:2 (March 1981) 162–168
Humphrey, Watts S.: Managing the Software Process. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1989.
Kelly, Van E., Nonnenmann, Uwe: Inferring Formal Software Specifications from Episodic Descriptions. Proceedings of AAAI 87. Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (13–17 July 1987) Seattle WA, 127–132
Lehman, M. M., Belady, L. A.: Program Evolution. Processes of Software Change. London: Academic Press, 1985
Ostrand, Thomas J., Weyuker, Elaine J.: Collecting and Categorizing Software Error Data in an Industrial Environment. The Journal of Systems and Software 4 (1984) 289–300
Perry, Dewayne E., Evangelist, W. Michael: An Empirical Study of Software Interface Errors. Proceedings of the International Symposium on New Directions in Computing, IEEE Computer Society (August 1985) Trondheim, Norway, 32–38
Perry, Dewayne E., Evangelist, W. Michael: An Empirical Study of Software Interface Faults — An Update. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (January 1987) Volume II 113–126
Perry, Dewayne E.: The Inscape Environment. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Software Engineering, (15–18 May 1989) Pittsburgh PA, 2–12
Perry, Dewayne E.: Industrial Strength Software Development Environments. Proceedings of IFIPS Congress '89 — 11th World Computer Congress (August 28–September 1, 1989) San Francisco CA
Perry, Dewayne E., Wolf, Alexander L.: Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 17:4 (October 1992) 40–52
Rowland, B. R., Anderson, R. E., McCabe, P. S.: The 3B20D Processor &: DMERT Operating System: Software Development System. The Bell System Technical Journal 62:1 part 2 (January 1983) 275–290.
Schneidewind, N. F., Hoffman, Heinz-Michael: An Experiment in Software Error Data Collection and Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-5:3 (May 1979) 276–286
Siegel, Sidney, and Castellan, Jr., N. John: Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988
Thayer, Thomas A., Lipow, Myron, Nelson, Eldred C.: Software Reliability — A Study of Large Project Reality. TRW Series of Software Technology, Volume 2. North-Holland, 1978.
Zave, Pamela, Jackson, Daniel: Practical Specification Techniques for Control-Oriented Systems. Proceedings of IFIPS Congress '89-11th World Computer Congress (August 28–September 1, 1989) San Francisco CA
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Perry, D.E., Stieg, C.S. (1993). Software faults in evolving a large, real-time system: a case study. In: Sommerville, I., Paul, M. (eds) Software Engineering — ESEC '93. ESEC 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 717. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57209-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57209-0_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-57209-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47972-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive