Investigating software failures with a software black box

One of the greatest safety improvement inventions for the airline industry has been the crash-protected Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Today, the FDR are mandatory equipment in most civil aircraft. With the data retrieved from the FDR, the last moments before an accident can be reconstructed. Constructing the analog of the FDR for avionics software would be very beneficial. When complex systems fail, it is often very difficult to determine the precise cause of the failure. This is largely due to insufficient or inappropriate data collection process, which does not permit the reconstruction of the circumstances that led to the failure. This research effort presents the Software Black Box (SBB), which constitutes a framework that facilitates the investigation and understanding of software failures. The SBB specifies a mechanism to capture the essentials of an executing program, and it provides a reconstruction technique that allows the generation of the scenarios that may have led to the software failure. The SBB architecture and a validation study are presented. The results provide insights into the tradeoffs and potential of the SBB