Results and experiences from an empirical study of fault reports in industrial projects

Faults introduced into systems during development are costly to fix, and especially so for business-critical systems. These systems are developed using common development practices, but have high requirements for dependability. This paper reports on an ongoing investigation of fault reports from Norwegian IT companies, where the aim is to seek a better understanding on faults that have been found during development and how this may affect the quality of the system. Our objective in this paper is to investigate the fault profiles of four business-critical commercial projects to explore if there are differences in the way faults appear in different systems. We have conducted an empirical study by collecting fault reports from several industrial projects, comparing findings from projects where components and reuse have been core strategies with more traditional development projects. Findings show that some specific fault types are generally dominant across reports from all projects, and that some fault types are rated as more severe than others.