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| Preventing and eliminating software faults through the life cycle | |
| Point of Contact |
Katerina Goseva-Popstajanova Katerina.Goseva@mail.wvu.edu |
| Dates | September 2007 - December 2010 |
| Problem | This proposal is focused on exploring the relationships between faults and failures, which tend to be very complex and are almost unexplored both from practical and theoretical point of view. Understanding why, how, and when faults manifest as failures is essential to determining how their introduction into the software systems can be prevented and when and how they can be eliminated from the system. Our one year experience with the International Space Station and several years experience with open source software, as well as the experience of other researchers who had worked with large, real software applications, show that existing change tracking systems, although designed and used with a different goal in mind, are rich, underused source of information about the way software systems fail and the software faults that cause these failures. We believe that a systematic and thorough analysis of the available empirical data will allow building a wealth of quantitative and qualitative knowledge that can be used to prevent introducing faults in the system and more efficiently eliminating them through the life cycle. |
| Objective | This project is focused on analyzing the data extracted from change/problem tracking systems of large, real systems aimed at identifying the most frequent classes of faults and failures and their characteristics with a goal to provide quantitative and qualitative results that will help limit recurrence of these faults/failures by both prevention and elimination of faults. Provided insights are expected to be extremely useful for systems like International Space Station that have to be in sustaining engineering for a long time. In addition, as our initial results and related work show, to large extent the results are consistent across different products and show that small number of fault types are responsible from most of the failure occurrences, that is, a subset of fault types dominates the fault distribution, which holds great potential for effective and cost efficient improvement of software quality. While conducting the proposed research, we will follow well defined steps and document the process to ensure repeatability. Specifically, we know that the NASA projects used as case studies can benefit from our work because these project maintain similar fault-failure data. It should be noted, however, that due to a lack of a unified change/problem tracking systems at NASA and in general, some amount of unique work on exploration of the format of the available data and automating the data extraction process may be needed. |
| Results | No results are available at this time. Please check back again. |
| Keywords | Software fault, failure, empirical studies, change/problem tracking systems, prevention and elimination of faults, cause-effect relationship |
| Categories |
Quality Assurance Quality Control Quality Engineering Domain-Specific Analysis Issue & Risk Tracking |
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Curator: Josh Stonestreet NASA Official: Lisa Montgomery |
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