8.3 Failure management
Software is so complex that, irrespective of how much effort you put into fault avoidance, you will make mistakes. You will introduce faults into your program that will sometimes cause it to fail. Program failures may also be a consequence of the failure of an external service or component that your software depends on. Whatever the cause, you have to plan for failure and make provisions in your software for that failure to be as graceful as possible.
Software failures fall into three general categories:
Data failures The outputs of a computation are incorrect. For example, if someone’s year of birth is 1981 and you calculate their age by subtracting 1981 from the current year, you may get an incorrect result. This type ...
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