Software Safety and Reliability

Guy Helmer
Software Safety and Reliability

I have worked with Dr. Robyn Lutz in the Department of Computer Science to apply software safety analysis techniques to software requirements for product families. Based on Nancy Leveson's book Safeware and prior work by Dr. Lutz, we

Derived a safety checklist to apply to four-variable requirements models (such as SCR and CoRE);
Used the checklist to analyze requirements models of selected members of the product family;
Compared the results to the product family's commonalities and variabilities.

We then used forward and backward search (Software Failure Modes and Effects Analysis and Software Fault Tree Analysis) to find hazards in selected members of the product family and derive additional safety requirements.

The distributed intrusion detection system model that I am developing has intriguing relationships to distributed fault detection and correction, and it would be interesting to pursue this idea.

Last Updated November 12, 1999