Recovery from Software Failures Caused by Mandelbugs

TitleRecovery from Software Failures Caused by Mandelbugs
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsM Grottke, DS Kim, R Mansharamani, M Nambiar, R Natella, and KS Trivedi
JournalIEEE Transactions on Reliability
Volume65
Issue1
Start Page70
Pagination70 - 87
Date Published03/2016
Abstract

Software failures are still a major concern in mission- and enterprise-critical contexts, despite significant efforts spent in software testing. In fact, while software testing is effective against easily-reproducible bugs (Bohrbugs), it is considerably less suitable for dealing with bugs that lead to hard-to-reproduce failures (Mandelbugs). On the positive side, the elusive nature of Mandelbugs provides opportunities for failure recovery, which are investigated in this paper. Based on real cases of Mandelbugs in eleven Information Technology (IT) systems running in production, the paper proposes a model that describes the recovery processes in IT systems. It then presents closed-form expressions, and a numerical analysis, of the mean time to recovery, and the software (un)availability. This analysis allows the designer to compare recovery strategies, as well as to determine the parameters having a high influence on the efficacy of recovery from failures caused by Mandelbugs.

DOI10.1109/TR.2015.2452933
Short TitleIEEE Transactions on Reliability