Customer Reviews

Software Safety and Reliability: Techniques, Approaches, and Standards of Key Industrial Sectors (Practitioners)

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Software Safety and Reliability is an excellent resource for those who want to learn more about software safety. By going into detail into the approaches taken by a number of respected organizations, the reader can take the best of each and apply them to their own problems.

The major weakness in the approach was the reliance on software reliability as the major tool. A system safety approach as advocated by Dr. Nancy Leveson is much more complete and effective than reliability. Her latest book, Safeware: System Safety and Computers is a better resource for those who are really interested in the "How to's" of an effective software safety program.

For the Software Safety professional, both references would be essential for your bookshelf.

Q. What's there to know about most software-intensive system safety standards?

A. They proscribe what is considered to be an appropriate level of software engineering rigor proportional to the risk associated with the development.

The objectives each standard requires are somewhat different - eg 50128 front loads on formal analysis, DO-178B emphasizes verification of expected behavior etc...

If you really need to know the difference between standards then chances are you need the standards in question. This book won't provide you a better insight than that. If you are in the business of system safety you will quickly outgrow the works of Hermann and Leveson.