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Automating Software Failure Reporting: We can only fix those bugs we know about.

Author:

Brendan MurphyAuthors Info & Claims

Queue, Volume 2, Issue 8

Pages 42 - 48

https://doi.org/10.1145/1036474.1036498

Published: 01 November 2004 Publication History

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Abstract

There are many ways to measure quality before and after software is released. For commercial and internal-use-only products, the most important measurement is the user’s perception of product quality. Unfortunately, perception is difficult to measure, so companies attempt to quantify it through customer satisfaction surveys and failure/behavioral data collected from its customer base. This article focuses on the problems of capturing failure data from customer sites. To explore the pertinent issues I rely on experience gained from collecting failure data from Windows XP systems, but the problems you are likely to face when developing internal (noncommercial) software should not be dissimilar.

Cited By

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Nguyen DHo NWong WChang I(2021)OBET: On-the-Fly Byte-Level Error Tracking for Correcting and Detecting Faults in Unreliable DRAM SystemsSensors10.3390/s2124827121:24(8271)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21248271
Yao ALi JWang FZhao JLiu HZhang JZhang JZhou ASong YXu JSun PZhu KAhuja NZhu DKuo S(2020)A Memory RAS System Design and Engineering Practice in High Temperature Ambient Data Center2020 19th IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm)10.1109/ITherm45881.2020.9190253(1379-1388)Online publication date: Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ITherm45881.2020.9190253
Podgurski AKucuk Y(2020)CounterFault: Value-Based Fault Localization by Modeling and Predicting Counterfactual Outcomes2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00044(382-393)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00044
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Index Terms

Automating Software Failure Reporting: We can only fix those bugs we know about.
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering
    2. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Reviews

Reviewer: Timothy R. Hopkins

A major problem facing today's software developers is how to capture the data necessary to pinpoint the causes of failures in their systems, once these have been released to end users. This paper looks at the problems associated with collecting such failure data automatically: what information needs to be obtained, how this information should be processed and used by developers, and the potential, possibly negative, impact of such a collection process on end users. Although the author is from Microsoft, and several of the examples are concerned with the analysis of XP failures, this paper is of general interest. It is not a highly technical paper, and should be readily accessible to anyone who wants to obtain an overview of the considerations necessary to produce and run an advanced bug reporting/fixing service. It is worth reading just for the patch required to fix many of the driver crashes reported by Microsoft's automated system. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Information

Published In

Queue Volume 2, Issue 8

System Failures

November 2004

57 pages

ISSN:1542-7730

EISSN:1542-7749

DOI:10.1145/1036474

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2004

Published in QUEUE Volume 2, Issue 8

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Cited By

View all

Nguyen DHo NWong WChang I(2021)OBET: On-the-Fly Byte-Level Error Tracking for Correcting and Detecting Faults in Unreliable DRAM SystemsSensors10.3390/s2124827121:24(8271)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21248271
Yao ALi JWang FZhao JLiu HZhang JZhang JZhou ASong YXu JSun PZhu KAhuja NZhu DKuo S(2020)A Memory RAS System Design and Engineering Practice in High Temperature Ambient Data Center2020 19th IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm)10.1109/ITherm45881.2020.9190253(1379-1388)Online publication date: Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ITherm45881.2020.9190253
Podgurski AKucuk Y(2020)CounterFault: Value-Based Fault Localization by Modeling and Predicting Counterfactual Outcomes2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00044(382-393)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00044
Zheng RHuang M(2017)Redundant Memory Array Architecture for Efficient Selective ProtectionACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News10.1145/3140659.308021345:2(214-227)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140659.3080213
Zheng RHuang M(2017)Redundant Memory Array Architecture for Efficient Selective ProtectionProceedings of the 44th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/3079856.3080213(214-227)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3079856.3080213
dos Santos CMatias R(2016)Exploratory Analysis on Failure Causes in a Mass-Market Operating SystemACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/2903267.290327450:1(18-30)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2903267.2903274
Murphy BCzerwonka JWilliams L(2015)Using Data to Make Decisions in Software EngineeringThe Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data10.1016/B978-0-12-411519-4.00013-6(349-375)Online publication date: 2015
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-411519-4.00013-6
Roehm TBruegge BJalote PBriand LHoek A(2014)Reproducing software failures by exploiting the action history of undo featuresCompanion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/2591062.2591101(496-499)Online publication date: 31-May-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2591062.2591101
Matias RPrince MBorges LSousa CHenrique LCho YShin SKim SHung CHong J(2014)An empirical exploratory study on operating system reliabilityProceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/2554850.2555021(1523-1528)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2554850.2555021
Nikolaev RBack GKaminsky MDahlin M(2013)VirtuOSProceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/2517349.2522719(116-132)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517349.2522719
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Discovering, reporting, and fixing performance bugs

Microtasking Software Failure Resolution: Early Results

Modeling and analysis of software aging and software failure

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