Research on Relations between Software Network Structure and Fault Propagation

The rapidly increasing application of software makes for the growing requirement of software quality. In key areas like aviation, aerospace and communication, a tiny software failure may brings serious consequences. Once the defects in the one or more software entities are triggered, the software faults may propagate to the extra entities and result in the partial failure of the software or even the system-wide failure. Therefore, to reduce software failure rate and assure software quality, the software fault propagation laws and influences on the software system demand more attention to be detected and controlled in the early phase. So in this paper, the complex network theories and methods are introduced into the fault propagation research of the structured software. By constructing the complex network model of structured software and abstracting the software faults into the status of nodes in the network, the software fault propagation laws and influence factors are analyzed, and the structured software fault propagation model is built.