City Research Online

Abstract

Experimental and theoretical evidence for the existence of contiguous failure regions in the program input space (blob defects) is provided. For real-time systems where successive input values tend to be similar, blob defects can have a major impact on the software survival time because the failure probability is not constant. For example, with a random walk input sequence, the probability of failure decreases as the time from the last failure increases. It is shown that the key factors affecting the survival time are the input trajectory, the rate of change of the input values, and the surface area of the defect (rather than its volume).

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 1993 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science > Software Reliability
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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