SAFETY-CRITICAL SOFTWARE: A RESEARCH AGENDA
ALFS T. BERZTISS · International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 1994
A system is safety-critical if failure of the system would result in loss of human life, personal injury, or significant material loss. Software that supports or supplants human control of safety-critical systems has to be highly reliable, but much research remains to be done before all the reliability-related issues of safety-critical software are fully understood. We discuss a research agenda under the following headings: completeness of requirements, readability of specifications, validation tools, validation of responsiveness, verification of implementations, software robustness, common-cause failures, reuse of reliable software, the software process, and ethical issues.