Title
An Exploratory Study of Field Failures
Abstract
Field failures, that is, failures caused by faults that escape the testing phase leading to failures in the field, are unavoidable. Improving verification and validation activities before deployment can identify and timely remove many but not all faults, and users may still experience a number of annoying problems while using their software systems.This paper investigates the nature of field failures, to understand to what extent further improving in-house verification and validation activities can reduce the number of failures in the field, and frames the need of new approaches that operate in the field.We report the results of the analysis of the bug reports of five applications belonging to three different ecosystems, propose a taxonomy of field failures, and discuss the reasons why failures belonging to the identified classes cannot be detected at design time but shall be addressed at runtime. We observe that many faults (70%) are intrinsically hard to detect at design-time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ISSRE.2017.10
2017 IEEE 28th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
field faults,field failures,field testing,fieldintrinsic faults,failure context,software testing
Journal
abs/1708.09494
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1071-9458
978-1-5386-0942-2
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
23
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Gazzola1453.10
L Mariani279841.16
Fabrizio Pastore332923.60
Mauro Pezzè41842106.03