Can software engineering methods give us better software safety standards?
, The Future of Safe Systems: Proceedings of the 31st Safety-Critical Systems Symposium (SSS’23) 7-9th February 2023, York, UK, 215--231. ISBN 979-8363385520.
Abstract
Are safety assurance standards actually software engineering artefacts, part of the decomposition of organisational goals into software requirements and designs? Loosely speaking, aren’t they just software that is executed by an organisation rather than a computer? And if so, can we use software engineering methods to improve them? Software safety standards have a vital role in delivering safe products, services and systems. In critical systems, software failures can lead to significant loss of life, so it is especially important that such standards are well understood by their users. Yet, they are often verbose, lengthy documents written by committees; hard for the uninitiated to immediately digest and understand, and awkward to implement as written. This implies that the re-view process for such standards is not entirely effective. Building on the author’s MSc research at the University of Oxford, this paper examines how techniques from the domain of software engineering and allied fields can be used to improve the review of standards, potentially leading to better safety standards and safer systems. It presents a selection of potential techniques, evaluates the results of applying them to Def Stan 00-055, (the Ministry of Defence’s Requirements for Safety of Programmable Elements in Defence Systems), shows how they can be helpful, and discusses the practicalities of applying them to review of new and existing standards.