Recovery Blocks
Brian Randell · Encyclopedia of Software Engineering · 2002
Abstract It is normal to employ fault tolerance techniques for copying with the occurrence and the effects of anticipated hardware component faults, and mistakes by users and operators. In complex systems whose failures could lead to loss of human life or great financial loss, the fault tolerance strategies used may well also include ones aimed at coping with residual design faults. The systems and applications software are typically of far greater logical complexity than the hardware on which they are running, so such design fault tolerance is usually aimed at software faults, and at complementing the verification and validation efforts that have been used to try to minimize the number of faults present when the software is deemed operational. The recovery block scheme was developed with the aim of facilitating the provision of software fault tolerance. To this end the recovery block scheme provides a single coherent error recovery strategy. Since its introduction the recovery block scheme has been the subject of experimental evaluations and now, increasingly, industrial application.