Title: An Exploratory Study of Field Failures,
Abstract: Field failures, that is, failures caused by faults that escape the testing
phase leading to failures in the field, are unavoidable. Improving verification
and validation activities before deployment can identify and timely remove many
but not all faults, and users may still experience a number of annoying
problems while using their software systems. This paper investigates the nature
of field failures, to understand to what extent further improving in-house
verification and validation activities can reduce the number of failures in the
field, and frames the need of new approaches that operate in the field. We
report the results of the analysis of the bug reports of five applications
belonging to three different ecosystems, propose a taxonomy of field failures,
and discuss the reasons why failures belonging to the identified classes cannot
be detected at design time but shall be addressed at runtime. We observe that
many faults (70%) are intrinsically hard to detect at design-time.