Coping explicitly with failures during the conception and the design of software development complicates significantly the designer's job. The design complexity leads to software descriptions difficult to understand, which have to undergo many simplifications until their first functioning version. To support the systematic development of complex, fault tolerant software, this paper proposes a layered framework for the analysis of the fault tolerance software properties, where the top-most layer provides the means for specifying the abstract failure semantics expressed in the initial conception stage, and each successive layer is a refinement towards an elaborated description of a fault tolerant software architecture. We present the logical vehicle that permits reasoning on the equivalence or the compatibility of the various expressions of fault tolerance properties at various abstraction levels. In addition, we propose a mapping schema, which permits the correct transformation of abstract entities into concrete ones, during a refinement process.