Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is literally rocket science. It was developed for the German V1 rocket bomb project.
FMEA has been used primarily in the defense industry since then. More recently, it has been used in the automobile industry.
Our interest is in adapting a simplified version of FMEA to software development and as far upstream in the design and development process as possible.
This may be done as a seven-step process based on the standard-practices manuals used for FMEA by the automobile industry.
Whereas FMEA can be applied at all levels of design development and usage, for software it is most useful at the design level as Design FMEA.
Software Failure Tree Analysis (SFTA) may be used in conjunction with FMEA as a means of anticipating errors in the final software product at the earliest possible stage of design.
Potential failures can also be mapped back to their likely sources, and redesign can be done to keep them from occurring later.
There are only five categories of common software failure modes. FMEA and SFTA are effective at catching them early in design.