| One of the greatest safety-improvement inventions for the airline industry has been the crash-protected Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Today, FDR for accident investigation are mandatory pieces of equipment in most civil aircrafts. With the data retrieved from the FDR, the last moments of the flight before the accident can be reconstructed.; Constructing the analog of the FDR for software would be beneficial because it is often very difficult to determine the precise cause of the failure when dealing with complex software systems. This is largely because insufficient or inappropriate information has been retained to permit the reconstruction of the circumstances that led to the failure.; This research effort presents the Software Black Box (SBB), which constitutes a framework that facilitates the investigation and understanding of software failures. The SBB specifies a mechanism to capture the essentials of an executing program, and provides a reconstruction technique which allows the generation of the scenarios that may have led to the failure. The SBB architecture, operation, advantages, limitations and potential are shown in this document. |
