Software Safety: Here's What You Need to Know to Protect Assets & Prevent Injuries

Effective software safety is essential because a software specification error, design flaw, or the lack of generic safety-critical requirements can contribute to or cause a system failure or erroneous human decision.

It’s generally accepted that to achieve an acceptable level of safety for software used in critical applications, software system safety engineering must be given primary emphasis early in the requirements definition and system conceptual design process.

The next step is for safety-critical software must then receive continuous management emphasis and engineering analysis throughout the development and operational lifecycles of the system.

Additionally, software with safety-critical functionality must be thoroughly verified with objective analysis.

Functional Hazard Analyses (FHA) are often conducted early on - in parallel with or as part of system engineering Functional Analyses - to determine the safety-critical functions (SCF) of the systems for further analyses and verification.

Because software safety is a concept which is only meaningful within a system context, it follows that software safety requirements must be obtained from information about hazards of the wider system. Consequently, any restriction on information pertaining to these hazards can lead to ambiguous or conflicting software safety requirements.

Besides the potential for injury, The total cost of poor software quality in the U.S. is estimated at $2.08 trillion.

Failure to patch known vulnerabilities and legacy system problems account for the largest amount of software issues.

Software system safety is directly related to the more critical design aspects and safety attributes in software and system functionality, whereas software quality attributes are inherently different and require standard scrutiny and development rigor. 

Want to learn more? Tonex offers Software Safety Training, a 3-day course that covers all aspects of Software Safety focusing on philosophies and methods in software safety and its primary objectives.

Additionally, Tonex offers several more courses in Software Safety including:

--Software Safety Course for Managers (2 days)

--Software Safety Programming and Software Coding Standards (2 days)

--Software Safety Training Workshop (2 days)

--Software Safety, Hazards Analysis and Risk Management Training Workshop (3 days)

--Software System Safety Engineering Training (3 days)

 For more information, questions, comments, contact us.