Software safety is important because software impacts our world in many important ways.
Almost everything that we touch, from the beginning to the end of our day, relies upon software. Consequently, software safety requires that systems be built and configured in a secure and reliable way.
Software safety allows management to familiarize themselves with corporate safety activities, immediately identify and minimize risk, as well as improve company culture that creates trust between front line employees and management.
Software safety also allows organizations to standardize their safety procedures and track, analyze, and optimize safety related activities more efficiently. This enables organizations to focus on measurable outcomes and make safety related decisions that are based on empirical data.
Software safety encompasses all areas of business operations including job hazard analysis, incident management, inspections, auditing and ergonomics.
Software safety is also beginning to become an important element of system safety as more and more hardware and equipment are run and controlled by software. Customary approaches such as hazard and fault tree analyses would help one to identify and assign hazards to either of a hardware or software nature.
Additionally, once software hazards have been identified, software architects and developers need to design the application architecture to ensure the software components are easy to test, verify and maintain.
All this leads to software safety techniques such as white-box testing, and the use of metrics as a proxy to measure the testedness, complexity and maintainability of program codes.
In the majority of accidents in which software was used to control actions of components, the cause can be traced to requirement flaws such as incomplete requirements in the specified and implemented software behavior.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers several courses in Software Safety where participants learn about all aspects of Software Safety focusing on philosophies and methods in software safety and its primary objectives: to design, code, test, and support software with the appropriate Level‐of‐Rigor (LOR) to instill a confidence, or the assurance of safe software.
Courses include:
Software Safety Course for Managers (2 days)
Software Safety Programming and Software Coding Standards (2 days)
Software Safety Training Workshop (2 days)
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.