Rare conditions and their effect on software failures

A Systems Engineering Approach to Exception Handling

“…A similar picture emerged from a study of failures during final test of the Space Shuttle Avionics (SSA) software prior to the first re-launch after the Challenger accident [9]. Exceptions are there referred to as rare events, and a rare report is a failure report in which the cause is traced to faulty exception handling.…”

Verifying the completeness of test

“…In previous work we have shown that exception handling is a very frequent cause of failures [12], and not every analyst will consider an exception handling routine as a function. Thus the visibility over exception handling tends to get lost in functional partitioning.…”

An Approach for Adaptive Fault Tolerance in Object-Oriented Open Distributed Systems

“…One difficult decision here is whether to include software failures in the set of credible failure modes. Since experience has shown that the possibility of software design faults cannot be ignored in large-scale applications [9], AFTM will provide a variety of fault-handling provisions for tolerating both hardware and software faults. However, the application designer will inform AFTM whether software faults should be considered by AFTM or not.…”