Software fault mitigation and availability assurance techniques

Companies are expected to keep their systems up and running and make data continuously available. Several recent studies have established that most system outages are due to software faults. In this paper, we discuss availability aspects of large software-based systems. We begin by classifying software faults into Bohrbugs and Mandelbugs, and identify aging-related bugs as a subtype of the latter. We then examine mitigation methods for Mandelbugs in general and aging-related bugs in particular. Finally, we discuss techniques for the quantitative availability assurance for such systems. © 2011 The Society for Reliability Engineering.