Enhancing Competitiveness Via a Public Fault & Failure Data Repository

Published

November 13, 1998

Author(s)

D Wallace

Abstract

you are leading a project with managers from other company divisions and want to conduct software inspections on the code. Some managers do not believe inspections add value. To support your case, you access a public data base containing software fault and failure data to locate systems in your application domain with project characteristics similar to yours. You separate the systems into two groups: those who used software inspection and those who didn't. You build a profile for each with their timelines, discovered fault count for inspection, unit test, integration test, and system test, and finally, time to delivery. You apply additional tools to help gauge whether inspections paid off in product quality, cost of the project, and delivery time. The result: you have quickly built a profile for a decision that may affect product quality and cost, time to market; these factors affect the bottom line of the product for which you are responsible. Can you use this approach today? Only if your company has such a data base with related query tools, for no such public data base exists. This paper describes a project at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology which is building tools and collecting data for such a facility. The facility will serve industry by providing profiles for answering similar questions about method effectiveness, benchmarks on faults and failures, and tools for understanding the data. It will provide researchers with data to support their efforts to develop new software methods in development, data analysis and measurement, and software reliability.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE High-Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium

Conference Dates

November 13-14, 1998

Conference Title

IEEE International High Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

Data analysis, data collection, failure, fault, reliability, software quality, World Wide Web (WWW)

Citation

Wallace, D. (1998), Enhancing Competitiveness Via a Public Fault & Failure Data Repository, Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE High-Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium (Accessed May 8, 2024)