Diagnosis of software failures using computational geometry

Abstract

Complex software systems have become commonplace in modern organizations and are considered critical to their daily operations. They are expected to run on a diverse set of platforms while interoperating with a wide variety of other applications. Although there have been advances in the discipline of software engineering, software faults, and malicious attacks still regularly cause system downtime [1]. Downtime of critical applications can create additional work, cause delays, and lead to financial loss [2]. This paper presents a computational geometry technique to tackle the problem of timely failure diagnosis during the execution of a software application. Our approach to failure diagnosis involves collecting a set of software metrics and building a geometric enclosures corresponding to known classes of faults. The geometric enclosures are then used to partition the state space defined by the metrics