Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Safe Safety Systems

ACM News Service: Software Safety by the Numbers.  IEC Standard 61508 describes how one establishes the safety and security of programmable electronics and the requirements on the development process for "traceability, criticality inspection, and validation." Safety integrity is also considered, including "failsafes to ensure the detection of failures and the system's switchover to a safe state should it be unable to carry out a safety function."

While this is directed toward embedded systems of a particular kind, it would seem that there is much lore here that translates into considerations for the vetting of autonomic systems for dependable computing.

Jeff Payne's 2004-04-26 Embedded.com article has the intriguing lead, "When it comes to safety, it's not what you do, but how you do it." The well-illustrated article begins with a great anecdotal example and then expands into the risk management procedures and development-process models appropriate for different levels of safety criticality.  These seem highly adaptable to an initiative for trustworthy software as well.
posted by orcmid at 5/29/2004 12:18:07 PM