Software, Errors, Faults and
Failures
RMUA Rathnayake
Reference: Software Quality Assurance - From Theory to implementation
by Daniel Galin)
How much costly a software failure
• The Explosion of the Ariane 5 (Cost: $370 million)
• Soviet Gas Pipeline Explosion
• NASA Mars Climate Orbiter
• Mariner 1 Spacecraft
• Y2K issue
• Patriot Missile Error
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Outline
•The term “software”
•Software errors, faults and failures
• Software errors
• Software faults
• Software failures
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Definition of Software
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The term - “Software” Is this software?
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The term - “Software” contd.
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The term - “Software” contd.
The IEEE definition of software, which is almost
identical to the ISO definition, lists the following four
components of software:
• Computer programs (the code)
• Procedures
• Documentation
• Data necessary for the operation of the system
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Software Errors, Faults and Failures
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Let’s look at an example (3 user views)
“We have used the Simplex HR software in our Human
1 Resources Department for about three years and we have
never had a software failure”
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“I started to use Simplex HR two months ago; we had so
2 many failures that we are considering replacing the software
package.”
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“We have been using the same software package for almost
3 four years. We were very satisfied through out the period
until the last few months, when we suddenly faced several
severe failures.”
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Let’s look at an example (3 user views)
For the same Software product,
can there be such a variation in
the user experience?
YES / NO ??
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Software issues that affect to quality
1. Software Errors
2. Software Faults
3. Software Failures
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Software errors
Software errors are sections of the code that
are partially or totally incorrect as a result of a
grammatical, logical or other mistake made by a
systems analyst, a programmer, or another
member of the software development team
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Software errors contd.
•Typically software errors are raised by,
• Developers
• Test engineers
•Errors can be of different types
• Syntactic, flow control, error handling, calculation,
hardware, user interface, etc.
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What are software faults?
“Anything that threatens the value of
the software to some person who
matters”
“The Fault is a state that causes the
software to fail to accomplish its
essential function”
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Software faults
•Software faults leads to incorrect functioning of
the software application
•A software fault occurs as a result of an error
that remains in the executing program
•Not all faults however are detected and the
software may continue executing without any
obvious problems
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Software faults contd.
•There are cases where software faults go
undetected for many years of a programs
existence
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Different types of faults that could occur
•Business Logic Faults
•Functional and Logical Faults
•Faulty GUI
•Performance Faults
•Security Faults
•Software/ hardware Faults
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Software failures
Software faults become software failures only
when they are “activated”, that is, when a user
tries to apply the specific software section that
is faulty
The root of any software failure is a software
error.
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Software failures
Do all software faults end with software failures?
Not necessarily: a software fault becomes a
software failure only when it is “activated”.
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Software failures
•Many defects lead to the software's failure,
which means that a loss specifies a fatal issue in
software/ application or in its module, which
makes the system unresponsive or broken.
•In other words, we can say that if an end-user
detects an issue in the product, then that
particular issue is called a failure.
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Software failures
Error Fault Failure
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