Research issues in software fault categorization

Software faults are a major threat for the dependability of software systems. When we intend to study the impact of software faults on software behavior, examine the quality of fault tolerance mechanisms, or evaluate diagnostic tech-niques, the issue of distinguishing fault categories and their frequency distribution arises immediately. This article sur-veys the literature that provides quantitative data on cate-gories of software faults and discusses the applicability of these software fault category distributions to fault injection case studies