Establishing the Relevancy of the Bookkeeping Libraries to the Functional Testing of Computer Implementations

In this paper, we address issues related to the definition of “faults,” “errors,” and “failures” and their separability, and attribution to the different development processes of computing systems. In particular, we deal with historical databases, which presumably contain certain data (i.e., test failure data) and describe the methodology that can be used to analyze the database and obtain the pertinent information. The validation method may be of particular importance, especially when information from the database needs to be extrapolated for a purpose other than the one for which the database was developed. Our methodology was used to evaluate the historical data collected during the development of the IBM 4381 and 9370 family of computers, and to extrapolate the faults found during the function testing.