Errors

Evolution in software industry has lead to evolution in many different industries, what was achievable only by mechanical machines, could be achieved now by software program and this increased the importance of software industry. However, there is no software without bugs or coding errors, those errors could be minor and fixed easily, others could threaten human lives, or result in failure of software products.

During our disaster recovery site building we have purchased a software to automate failover of windows based servers to the alternative site, as well the software was supposed to do an automated failback process of the previously failed over services to the main site. The software was sold to us on this basis, and the company’s sales team along with technical personal confirmed those features to be part of the solution design. Vendor produced the initial project plan and committed to complete the project within two weeks, at that time we had a believe that our setup is too complex to be complete in two weeks, and we have informed the vendor with our concern, but they confirmed to us that the same setup was done by them multiple times. After achieving partial failover of our servers and services, we wanted to test the failback procedure but we couldn’t. The software had an error that prevented partial failover, for the software to work properly we have to failover all our services and then fail them back again all together. Now we are stuck in the middle, we cannot failover services to the alternative site as this will impact services availability, and at the same time we cannot failback to main site because the software doesn’t support partial failback. Apparently the cause of the error was limitation in design to support multiple failover scenarios, and the problem was not identified earlier because testing partial failover was not performed or designed for by the vendor. In our case, this error jeopardized our operations could have resulted in data loss if reverse replication took place before understating the error consequences.

Software errors could result in manageable or unmanageable consequences; quality assurance and testing are two major processes should be conducted by introducing new software to avoid late discovery of errors, and minimize the impact of errors.

Reference:

Luguo, C, Xiaobo, W, & Chau, L 2011, 'An Approach to Improving Bug Assignment with Bug Tossing Graphs and Bug Similarities', Journal Of Software (1796217X), 6, 3, pp. 421-427, Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 June 2012.

Zaineb, G, & Manarvi, I 2011, 'IDENTIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF CAUSES FOR SOFTWARE BUG REJECTION WITH THEIR IMPACT OVER TESTING EFFICIENCY', International Journal Of Software Engineering & Applications, 2, 4, pp. 71-82, Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 June 2012