Recovery from Failures Due to Mandelbugs in IT Systems

Abstract

Several studies have been carried out on software bugs analysis and classification for life and mission critical systems, which include reproducible bugs called Bohrbugs, and hard to reproduce bugs called Mandelbugs. Although software reliability in IT systems has been studied for years, there are only a few formal analytic models for recovery from Mandelbugs. This paper discusses in detail several real cases of Mandelbugs and presents a simple flowchart which describes the recovery processes implemented in IT systems for a large variety of Mandelbugs. The flowchart is based on more than 10 IT systems that are running in production. The paper then presents a closed-form expression of the mean time to recovery from these bugs. Measures of interest including mean time to recovery and system unavailability are computed. A numerical and parametric sensitivity analysis of the model parameters are carried out. This analysis allows the designer to find out important parameter(s) for the recovery from failures due to Mandelbugs.