Fault propagation analysis in software intensive systems: A survey

As with the increase of software complexity, software failure has become an important threat to the reliability of software intensive systems. Software fault propagation behaviors, which are prevalent in complex software systems, have a ubiquitous influence on software reliability design and evaluation process. Software fault propagation is a necessary condition for the failure of complex software systems. It is of great significance to investigate it to improve the reliability of software systems. This paper investigates existing software fault propagation analysis methods and gives a taxonomy of existing fault propagation analysis methods, which can be used to understand these methods well. After that, several typical fault propagation analysis methods are introduced according to different analysis levels. This survey also finds that researchers tend to use methods which have a high degree of abstraction, such as entropy measurement, complex network methods, and system engineering methods, to deal with the fault propagation analysis in software intensive systems. Finally, several shortcomings are listed and the future trends of fault propagation analysis are emphasized.