EMPIRICAL STUDY OF SOFTWARE INTERFACE FAULTS - AN UPDATE.

Abstract

In [Perry 85] we reported work in progress on the analysis of software interface faults in a large software system. In this update of that work, we complete the analysis of the interface faults for this large system and extend our results. In our original analysis, we determined that there were 15 categories of interface faults in the prima facie interface fault set of errors reports. We add one new category as a result of our completed analysis: hardware/software interface problems. We summarize our original findings for the set of errors determined by our operational definition of interface faults, present our new findings for the single-file interface faults, and then present the characterization of interface faults with respect to the total error population.