FAIL: Analyzing Software Failures from the News Using LLMs

Software failures inform engineering work, standards, regulations. For example, the Log4J vulnerability brought government and industry attention to evaluating and securing software supply chains. Retrospective failure analysis is thus a valuable line of software engineering research. Accessing private engineering records is difficult, so such analyses tend to use information reported by the news media. However, prior works in this direction have relied on manual analysis. That has limited the scale of their analyses. The community lacks automated support to enable such analyses to consider a wide range of news sources and incidents.