The variation of software survival time for different operationalinput profiles (or why you can wait a long time for a big bug to fail)

摘要

Experimental and theoretical evidence for the existence ofcontiguous failure regions in the program input space (blob defects) isprovided. For real-time systems where successive input values tend to besimilar, blob defects can have a major impact on the software survivaltime because the failure probability is not constant. For example, witha random walk input sequence, the probability of failure decreases asthe time from the last failure increases. It is shown that the keyfactors affecting the survival time are the input trajectory, the rateof change of the input values, and the surface area of the defect(rather than its volume)