A Preliminary Taxonomy for Software Failure Impact

Software quality is of strategic importance to decision makers in enterprises. When software fails, the resulting impact on a business can be severe. So far software failure has been mainly studied from the perspective of the developer by examining error prevention and correction through software testing and debugging. Even with a robust development process, software is almost never free of errors and thus failures will occur after the initial development process is completed and the software is installed and in use in an enterprise. Understanding the impact of such production software failures on enterprises, however, is complex and little research has been done on it. This paper starts the process of understanding the enterprise impact of software failure by developing a categorization, or taxonomy, of software failure impacts on the enterprise. We show how the resulting taxonomy can be applied to support practitioners and researchers in their efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise impact of software failures