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Software Failure | Software Engineer

This topic is all about Software failure. In this article, we are going to cover what is software failure, software reliability and classifications of software failure?
Submitted by Monika Sharma, on November 16, 2019

Software Failure

A failure that shows up when the user recognizes that the software has come to bring to an end to deliver the anticipated result with respect to the specification input values. The user may need to identify the seriousness of the levels of failures such as disastrous, dangerous, major or minor, depending on their impact on the computer or hardware.

Program analysis tools

A program analysis tool means a pre-generated tool that takes the source code or the runnable code of a program as input and generates reports regarding several important attributes of the program, such as its size, seriousness, acceptability of commenting, honor to programming rules, etc.

We can easily classify these into two broad categories of program analysis tools,

1. Static Analysis Tools
2. Dynamic Analysis Tools

a) Static program analysis tools

The static analysis tool is also a module of codes that uses analysis tools. It evaluates and computes various important features of a software product without running it. Commonly, static analysis tools run some structural delineation of a program to arrive at certain logical results, The structural properties that are usually checked are,

• Whether the coding quality has been stick to?
• Some programming mistakes or errors such as a mismatch between real and fake rules, variables that are declared but never used are also checked.

b) Dynamic program analysis tools

Dynamic program analysis skills needed for the program to carry out and its real behavior recorded. A dynamic analyzer usually records the code i.e. adds an additional set of commands in the source code to collect program execution follow the path. The devised code when run allows us to record the performance of the software for different test cases.

Software reliability

The reliability of a software product essentially represents its dependability or reliability. Alternatively, the reliability of a software product can also be defined as the chances of the product working correctly over a given period of time.

Classification of software failures

• Transient: Transient failures show up only for particular input values while supplicating a function of the system.
• Permanent: Permanent failures show up for all input values while supplicating a function of the system.
• Recoverable: When recoverable failures occur, the system retrieves with or without operator involvement.
• Unrecoverable: In unrecoverable failures, the system requires to be restarted.
• Cosmetic: These classes of failures cause only minor problems, and do not lead to wrong results. An example of a cosmetic failure is the scenario where the mouse button has to be clicked twice instead of once to supplicate a given function through the GUI.