Title :
Software safety risk in legacy safety-critical computer systems
Author :
Hill, Janice ; Baggs, Rhoda
Author_Institution :
NASA, Kennedy Space Center, Orlando, FL
Abstract :
Safety-critical computer systems must be engineered to meet system and software safety requirements. For legacy safety-critical computer systems, software safety requirements may not have been formally specified during development. When process-oriented software safety requirements are levied on a legacy system after the fact, where software development artifacts don´t exist or are incomplete, the question becomes ´how can this be done?´ The risks associated with only meeting certain software safety requirements in a legacy safety-critical computer system must be addressed should such systems be selected as candidates for reuse. This paper proposes a method for ascertaining formally, a software safety risk assessment, that provides measurements for software safety for legacy systems which may or may not have a suite of software engineering documentation that is now normally required. It relies upon the NASA Software Safety Standard, risk assessment methods based upon the taxonomy-based questionnaire, and the application of reverse engineering CASE tools to produce original design documents for legacy systems.
Keywords :
risk management; safety-critical software; software maintenance; NASA Software Safety Standard; legacy safety-critical computer systems; process-oriented software safety requirements; reverse engineering CASE tools; software engineering documentation; software safety risk assessment; taxonomy-based questionnaire; Application software; Documentation; NASA; Programming; Risk management; Software engineering; Software measurement; Software safety; Software standards; Systems engineering and theory;
Conference_Titel :
SoutheastCon, 2007. Proceedings. IEEE
Conference_Location :
Richmond, VA
Print_ISBN :
1-4244-1028-2
Electronic_ISBN :
1-4244-1029-0
DOI :
10.1109/SECON.2007.342891