李彤《软件工程》教学课件ch3.pptVIP

Reliability improvement Removing X% of the faults in a system will not necessarily improve the reliability by X%. A study at IBM showed that removing 60% of product defects resulted in a 3% improvement in reliability Program defects may be in rarely executed sections of the code so may never be encountered by users. Removing these does not affect the perceived reliability A program with known faults may therefore still be seen as reliable by its users Safety Safety is a property of a system that reflects the system’s ability to operate, normally or abnormally, without danger of causing human injury or death and without damage to the system’s environment It is increasingly important to consider software safety as more and more devices incorporate software-based control systems Safety requirements are exclusive requirements i.e. they exclude undesirable situations rather than specify required system services Primary safety-critical systems Embedded software systems whose failure can cause the associated hardware to fail and directly threaten people. Secondary safety-critical systems Systems whose failure results in faults in other systems which can threaten people Discussion here focuses on primary safety-critical systems Secondary safety-critical systems can only be considered on a one-off basis Safety criticality Safety and reliability are related but distinct In general, reliability and availability are necessary but not sufficient conditions for system safety Reliability is concerned with conformance to a given specification and delivery of service Safety is concerned with ensuring system cannot cause damage irrespective of whether or not it conforms to its specification Safety and reliability Specification errors If the system specification is incorrect then the system can behave as specified but still cause an accident Hardware failures generating spurious inputs Hard to anticipate in the specification Context-sensitive commands i.e. issuing the right comman