An Exploration of Software Faults and Failure Behaviour in a Large Population of Programs

Authors:
M. J. P. van der Meulen;P. G. Bishop;M. Revilla
Affiliations:
City University, UK;City University, UK;University of Valladolid, Spain
Venue:
ISSRE '04 Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
Year:
2004

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Abstract

A large part of software engineering research suffers from a major problem-there are insufficient data to test software hypotheses, or to estimate parameters in models. To obtain statistically significant results, a large set of programs is needed, each set comprising many programs built to the same specification. We have gained access to such a large body of programs (written in C, C++, Java or Pascal) and in this paper we present the results of an exploratory analysis of around 29,000 C programs written to a common specification. The objectives of this study were to characterise the types of fault that are present in these programs; to characterise how programs are debugged during development; and to assess the effectiveness of diverse programming. The findings are discussed, together with the potential limitations on the realism of the findings.