Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Primary
Secondary
Fail-over
Safe
situation
System
Fail-safe
Fail-over and fail-safe
Figure 1.6
Avoiding failures.
boundary conditions (array bounds, divide by zero) are examples of such
fail-safe mechanisms.
Product and Project Failures
Product development involves one or more projects, each of which has
its own life cycle. A failure of the latter — that is, project failure — could
be the result of inaccurate initiation, choosing a wrong life cycle, inade-
quate resourcing or funding, contractual disagreements, etc. An important
observation to remember is that products may fail due to inadequacies in
the projects driving them. Interestingly, these inadequacies do not cause
project failures themselves. More details on product and project failures
are discussed in Chapter 7 on life cycles.
Summary
Failure as a field has been studied extensively ever since machines and
mechanical devices were created. There are many degrees of failure: the
software could become inoperable; it could be operable but not deliver
to its desired specifications; it may have been built to specifications but
become unreliable to a point that its use is being impacted. Some of the
reasons why software applications fail include insufficient R&D (research
and development) processes during development and the natural tendency
of humans to oversimplify complex interrelationships among the core
