Software Errors and Their Effects on Software Product Functionality: A Literature Review and Research Gap Analysis Through the Technology-Organization-Environment Lens

Abstract

The pervasive integration of software into digital products has made software errors a first-order concern for users, developers, and organizations, because defects that survive development and testing directly degrade software product functionality. This paper presents a structured literature review of software errors and their effects on software product functionality, organized through the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. Drawing on studies published primarily between 2019 and 2023, and retrieved from Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library, and ProQuest, the review synthesizes evidence across three directions: technological factors that introduce errors, including development tools, documentation quality, architecture, third-party dependencies, and cloud platforms; organizational factors and consequences, including security practice, regulatory compliance, requirements understanding, and resourcing; and external environmental factors that affect software developers, including market pressure, distributed teamwork, human values, and privacy regulation. The review then evaluates conventional, automated, and emerging artificial intelligence based testing approaches and their limitations in preventing errors from reaching production. The synthesis shows that prior work has extensively documented what software errors cost and how testing detects them, but has rarely examined the root causes of errors from the lived perspective of the software developers who introduce, detect, and repair them across all three TOE dimensions simultaneously. Five research gaps are identified and mapped to future research directions, including qualitative phenomenological inquiry into developer experiences and human-like, vision-based automated testing.