The Real Cost of Software Errors

Zhivich, Michael; Cunningham, Robert K.

doi:10.1109/msp.2009.56

Cited by 98 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…When this happens in a critical application, it can cause great loss of money or even human lives. For example, Zhivich and Cunningham [40] report that the software of a hospital miscalculated the proper dosage of radiation for patients. In this accident, at least eight patients died.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study on Real Bug Fixes

Zhong

2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

124

112

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Abstract-Software bugs can cause significant financial loss and even the loss of human lives. To reduce such loss, developers devote substantial efforts to fixing bugs, which generally requires much expertise and experience. Various approaches have been proposed to aid debugging. An interesting recent research direction is automatic program repair, which achieves promising results, and attracts much academic and industrial attention. However, people also cast doubt on the effectiveness and promise of this direction. A key criticism is to what extent such approaches can fix real bugs. As only research prototypes for these approaches are available, it is infeasible to address the criticism by evaluating them directly on real bugs. Instead, in this paper, we design and develop BUGSTAT, a tool that extracts and analyzes bug fixes. With BUGSTAT's support, we conduct an empirical study on more than 9,000 real-world bug fixes from six popular Java projects. Comparing the nature of manual fixes with automatic program repair, we distill 15 findings, which are further summarized into four insights on the two key ingredients of automatic program repair: fault localization and faulty code fix. In addition, we provide indirect evidence on the size of the search space to fix real bugs and find that bugs may also reside in non-source files. Our results provide useful guidance and insights for improving the state-of-the-art of automatic program repair.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Study on Real Bug Fixes

Zhong

2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

124

112

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“…This means that the overall number of bugs is growing alarmingly [1]. In addition, errors can cause tremendous costs and even be fatal to human life [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MultiPathPrivacy: Enhanced Privacy in Fault Replication

Louro

Garcia

Romano

2012

2012 Ninth European Dependable Computing Conference

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Abstract-Most computer applications are published with bugs, whose reproducibility is strictly dependent on the availability of detailed information about the real usage of the application. Unfortunately, this data collection process raises severe privacy issues, as error reports are very likely to include personal information. This represents a strong disincentive for users to submit error reports, hampering the software maintenance process.In this work we address the issue of how to design data obfuscation mechanisms aimed at anonymizing the error reports generated by faulty applications, without compromising the bug reproducibility. The solution presented in this paper, MultiPathPrivacy, is based on an idea which is, to the best our knowledge, still unexplored in literature: maximizing the achievable degree of obfuscation by exploiting the presence of multiple execution paths leading to the manifestation of the same bug.MultiPathPrivacy relies on an off-line reachability analysis phase, based on symbolic execution techniques, which is aimed at identifying not only the set of alternative execution paths leading to the execution of the code block where the bug manifested, but also to determine the symbolic constraints on the user inputs that are necessary to generate such execution paths.By exploiting the presence of disjoint sets of alternative user inputs/execution paths leading to the manifestation of the same bug, MultiPathPrivacy allows achieving striking improvements of the anonymization quality when compared to state of the art solutions. Via an experimental study, based both on a real, privacy-sensitive application and on publicly available software repositories, we show that MultiPathPrivacy can achieve up to 87% reduction of the amount of user input information leaked by the error report, evaluated in terms of bits of information revealed, and percentage of residual non-anonymized input.

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“…There were multiple incidents and circumstances along the way that also caused this unfortunate outcome. For instance, there was a software bug in one of the Ohio power plants that prevented authorities from recognizing and mitigating the power outage earlier [5]. Also, the teenager did not have lights on his bicycle, nor was he wearing a helmet, both of which are speculated to have contributed to the fatality [6].…”

Section: Cause and Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

A taxonomy of perturbations: Determining the ways that systems lose value

Mekdeci

Ross

Rhodes

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE International Systems Conference SysCon 2012

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Abstract-Disturbances and disruptions, both internal and external to the system, are a major concern for system architects who are responsible for ensuring that their systems maintain value robustness no matter what occurs. These perturbations can have multiple causes and can affect a system in multiple ways. This paper presents a taxonomy of disturbances and disruptions to assist system architects and researchers in identifying the ways in which systems can fail to deliver value. By doing so, this taxonomy falls into a larger research effort to develop survivability design principles that will help system architects design systems that prevent, mitigate and recover from disturbances.

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The Real Cost of Software Errors

Cited by 98 publications

References 2 publications

An Empirical Study on Real Bug Fixes

An Empirical Study on Real Bug Fixes

MultiPathPrivacy: Enhanced Privacy in Fault Replication

A taxonomy of perturbations: Determining the ways that systems lose value

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