Analysis of Software Faults using Safety-techniques with Respect to the Software System DAIM

Abstract

In this master thesis we have analyzed the software system DAIM, which is a web-based delivery system used at NTNU in connection with master theses and master students, with respect to software faults. Based on the documentation from the design stage of the DAIM project we have performed a technique called Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA), which is an analysis technique from safety-critical development. The results from this analysis have been compared with existing fault reports containing actual faults discovered in the system. Some of the intention behind our work has been to find if hazards identified with PHA can be related to actual faults found in the fault reports. In [17] it is stated that correcting software faults in later phases of the software development is much more expensive than in earlier phases and we have performed the PHA to see if some of the faults could have been avoided. We found that there were some connections between some of the faults and hazards identified, but the results were not entirely as expected. In our previous work we did a similar kind of analysis as we have done in this work regarding the analysis of fault reports and we have compared the results from our previous work with some of the results that we have obtained from this work to see how the distribution of fault types varies between the projects. The results showed that there were several differences between the projects, but some similarities were also discovered.