A lot of things are wrong with it.

> Runtime errors surface when a program runs into an unexpected condition or situation such as dividing by zero,

This implicitly asserts that dividing by zero is always unexpected, that all runtime errors are unexpected, and that dividing by zero always causes a runtime error. None of these are true. Dividing by zero is very frequently not unexpected (it's utterly commonplace in 3-D graphics, for example, when a vertex happens to be in the camera's focal plane) and in floating-point math (standardized by, ironically, the IEEE) it doesn't generate runtime errors by default. Moreover, there are certain applications where runtime errors are also expected, such as in fuzzers. Some languages frequently use their runtime error mechanism to convey perfectly mundane conditions such as not finding a key in a hash table or coming to the end of a sequence. And it's fairly often a useful mechanism for terminating a recursive search procedure.

> memory overflow,

There's no such thing as a "memory overflow" on any platform I'm familiar with. This might have been intended to reference any of five things: stack overflows, buffer overflows, heap allocation failures, resource limit exhaustion, or OOM kills.

The stack is an area of memory, and a "stack overflow" is an attempt to put too much data in it, usually due to an infinite recursive loop. Stack overflows do often get detected as runtime errors, but many platforms fail to detect them, causing incorrect program behavior instead.

A buffer is also an area of memory (an array) and a "buffer overflow" is an attempt to put too much data in it, usually due to an omitted check on input data size. Buffer overflows do sometimes get detected as runtime errors, but often do not, because the most popular implementations of many popular programming languages (notably C, C++, and Pascal) do not do automatic bounds checking.

Heap allocation failures are attempts to dynamically allocate memory that are denied, often because too much memory is already allocated, so in a sense your heap memory has "overflowed". Some programming languages handle this as a runtime error, but the most popular implementations of many popular programming languages (notably C, C++, and Pascal) do not.

Resource limit exhaustion is a condition where a program exceeds operating-system-imposed limits on its usage of resources such as CPU time, output file size, or memory usage, in response to which the OS raises a runtime error. On Unix this manifests as killing the process with a signal.

OOM kills are a Linux thing where the OS starts killing resource-intensive processes to attempt to recover from a memory overload condition that is degrading service badly. In a sense the computer's memory has "overflowed", so Unix's runtime error mechanism is pressed into service. (Something very similar happens if you press ^C, though, so describing this as a "runtime error" is maybe not defensible.)

> or addressing a wrong or unauthorized memory location or device,

The standard verb here would be "accessing", not "addressing", but I don't want to make too much of the use of nonstandard terminology; it's not always an indicator of unfamiliarity with the field. And there are indeed machines where there are kinds of "wrong" other than "unauthorized"—that's why we have SIGBUS, for unaligned access exceptions on CPUs that don't support unaligned access.

But "device" is, as far as I know, wrong; I don't know of any platform which raises a runtime error when you try to access the wrong device. There are a number of platforms that have I/O instructions which will raise a runtime error if you try to use them in unprivileged code, but that doesn't depend on which device you're accessing. Usually in small microcontrollers there isn't any kind of runtime-error mechanism, and when there is, it generally isn't invoked for I/O instructions. Sometimes you can set up the MPU so that certain code can't access devices—when they're memory-mapped, in which case "memory location" would have covered the case.

Even if there is some platform where it's possible to get a runtime error accessing the wrong device, it's far from the kind of common case you'd want to include in such an abbreviated list of typical causes of runtime errors "for someone who does not have prior knowledge of what a runtime error is". Much more typical would be illegal instructions, attempts to access privileged state from unprivileged code, null pointer dereferences, runtime type errors such as ClassCastException, and array bounds violations, none of which are mentioned.

It seems like someone who doesn't know anything about software was trying to imagine what kinds of things might, in theory, cause runtime errors, but the kinds of protection mechanisms they imagined were completely different from the ones used in actual existing computers.

> or when a program tries to perform an illegitimate or unauthorized operation

As a simple matter of logic, this subsumes the previous item, and "illegitimate" in this context means the same thing as "unauthorized". So this list is not just comprehensively wrong at a technical level, but also so badly written as to be incoherent.

> or tries to access a library, for example.

This is completely wrong. Of course a program can get a runtime error when it tries to load a library, just as it can get a runtime error when it undertakes any other task, but there is no platform that raises a runtime error whenever you try to access a library.

> The programs must be thoroughly tested for various types of inputs (valid data sets, invalid data sets and boundary value data sets) and conditions to identify these errors.

This statement, in itself, only contains a couple of slight factual errors.

First, it says that the inputs to programs are data sets. This is probably something that someone who doesn't know anything about software copied from a 60-year-old textbook, because at that time, the inputs to programs were data sets (now more commonly known as files). In fact, the more important inputs to programs nowadays are things such as user interactions, data received over a network, and data received in real time from sensors such as microphones, oxygen sensors, and accelerometers. But this statement is stuck in punched-card land, where programs punched into card decks ran in batch mode to process some input data sets and produce some output data sets.

The second factual error is that it implies that runtime errors result primarily from inputs and how the program responds to them. And, of course, there are runtime errors that are determined by the program's handling of inputs; typically type errors, null pointer exceptions, array bounds violations, etc., can be reproduced if you run the program again with the same input. But large classes of runtime errors do not fit this profile. Some are errors that depend on internal nondeterminism in the program, such as nondeterministic interactions between different threads (we would say "scheduler interleaving order" back in the single-core days), or nondeterministic timing. Others depend on runtime conditions like how much memory is available to allocate or how full the disk is (writing to a full disk in Python raises an exception, though not in many other languages). Others result from hardware problems such as overheating. The statement does, in passing, say "and conditions", but these are given short shrift.

The much bigger problem with this statement, though, is that it's in the middle of a paragraph about runtime errors. But everything it says is equally applicable to logic errors, the subject of the next paragraph; indeed, much of it is more applicable to logic errors. Putting it in the middle of this paragraph misleadingly implies that things like testing with invalid input files (or the other, more important, invalid inputs it failed to mention) are uniquely or primarily applicable to runtime errors.

> Once identified, runtime errors are easy to fix.

This statement is also wrong in a multidimensional way.

First, although this is in the "debugging" section, many runtime errors aren't bugs at all. A program crashing with a MemoryError or OutOfMemoryError when it is run with insufficient memory available to allocate is, in general, desired behavior. It's also often the desired behavior when it's applied to a too-large input, though obviously that's not acceptable for games or avionics software. The same is true of permission errors, out-of-disk-space errors, etc. These are specifically the kind of runtime errors that most commonly result from the "and conditions" in the previous sentence.

Second, while it's usually easier to debug a segfault or exception than silently incorrect output, it is often far from trivial to track down the runtime error to its ultimate cause.

Third, even when you have figured out what the ultimate cause is, fixing it is sometimes not easy, for example because other people's deployed software depends on interfaces you have to change, or more generally because it is difficult to understand what other problems could be caused by the possible fixes you are considering.

By my count, that's 12 significant factual errors in 86 words, an average of 7.2 words per error. This is an error density that would be impressive in any contexts, although I've occasionally seen expert liars exceed it somewhat. In the context of an official publication purporting to establish standards for professional competence, it's utterly horrifying.

So this is not a definition fit for anyone, least of all someone who does not have prior knowledge of what a runtime error is; it is very far from being fine. It's embarrassing horseshit.

And it's not just this one paragraph. Virtually the entire document is like this. Occasionally you'll find a paragraph that's mostly correct from beginning to end, but then it'll be followed by the cringiest idiocy you can possibly imagine in the very next paragraph.

With respect to this paragraph in particular, an even worse problem than its unreliability is emphasis. This is from §4.6, "Debugging", which is 189 words, about a quarter of p. 16-13 (p. 326/413). Debugging is arguably the central activity of software engineering; about a quarter of the effort† spent on software engineering is spent on debugging, an amount which would be larger if we didn't spend so much effort on avoiding debugging (for example, with type systems, unit tests, version control, and documentation). Any actual software engineering body of knowledge would be largely concerned with knowledge about debugging. But the IEEE relegates it to 0.2% of their document.

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† in https://www.quora.com/In-a-typical-software-engineering-comp... Raja Nagendra Kumar says 80% in IT services and typically 20–50% in "product companies", and Gene Sewell says ⅓ of the time; in https://www.quora.com/How-much-time-does-a-programmer-spend-... Ben Gamble says 5–70% of each day and Stephen Bear says ideally about 10% if you're doing everything else right; https://old.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/1eclw4l/i... complains about spending 60–70% of their time debugging; https://old.reddit.com/r/computerscience/comments/lwemi5/is_... quotes the Embedded Market Survey as saying 20%, while other people report numbers as high as 80%; https://craftbettersoftware.com/p/debugging-the-biggest-wast... says 50%, referencing https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345843594_Reversibl.... So I think "a quarter" is a pretty reasonable ballpark.