Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!pt!dld From: dld@F.GP.CS.CMU.EDU (David Detlefs) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Reference sought... Message-ID: Date: 9 Feb 89 15:53:28 GMT Organization: CMU CS Department Lines: 25 I am trying to find references to empirical work that classifies the sources of errors in programs. I would like some evidence on just how much program reliability is enhanced by automatic storage management. I can find a lot of anecdotal/wisdom-of-the-elder evidence saying that improper explicit storage management is the source of many nasty bugs, but I'd rather find something more scientific. Ideally, the abstract of such a paper would say something like: "We instituted strict bug reporting and tracking procedures on the HOOFDEWHO project, written in the C programming language. An analysis of this data indicates that x% of all bugs are caused by improperly free'd storage. Finding these bugs took y% of all debugging time, and z% of bug-correction time." Any leads to anything remotely like this would be appreciated. Thanks! -- Dave Detlefs Any correlation between my employer's opinion Carnegie-Mellon CS and my own is statistical rather than causal, dld@cs.cmu.edu except in those cases where I have helped to form my employer's opinion. (Null disclaimer.) --