Software Assumptions Failure Tolerance: Role, Strategies, and Visions

At the authors behest or otherwise, while their software is being executed, a huge variety of design assumptions is continuously matched with the truth of the current condition. While standards and tools exist to express and verify some of these assumptions, in practice most of them end up being either sifted off or hidden between the lines of their codes. Across the system layers, a complex and at times obscure web of assumptions determines the quality of the match of the authors' software with its deployment platforms and run-time environments. Their position is that it becomes increasingly important being able to design software systems with architectural and structuring techniques that allow software to be decomposed to reduce its complexity, but without hiding in the process vital hypotheses and assumptions