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terminologytheoryfault

An example of dormant fault?

I have been thinking about the dormant fault and cannot figure out an example. By definition, dormant fault is a fault (defect in the code) that does not cause error and thus do not cause a failure. Can anyone give me an example? The only thing that crossed my mind was unusued buggy code.. Thanks

Solution

  • Dormant faults are much more common than one might think. Most programmers have experienced moments of thinking "What was I thinking? How could that ever run correctly?", even though the code didn't show erroneous behaviour. A classic case is faulty corner-case handling, e.g. on failed memory allocation:

    char *foo = malloc(42);
strcpy( foo, "BarBaz" );

    The above code will work fine in most situations and pass tests just fine; however, when malloc fails due to memory exhaustion, it will fail miserably. The fault is there, but dormant.