Not so very long ago, I was given an assignment to perform a forensic analysis on a piece of firmware. It seems that my client’s device had a rather spectacular failure which endangered many lives. The job was critical, but this was new territory for me.
The so-called experts will tell you it can’t be done; it is not possible to create bug-free software, at least at low-cost for a non-trivial application. Now it seems, we have our first documented case of ostensibly zero-defect software.
Continue reading “Correctness by Construction: Praxis Scores!” »
Until Agile, software processes in general focused on larger projects. When applied to smaller projects they can become cumbersome and inefficient. Agile has demonstrated its value on relatively small projects, but it does not scale up well, and in my opinion some of its core tenets are incompatible with safety-critical development.
I just finished reading Steve McConnell’s Professional Software Development: Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, Enhanced Careers. This is not a book about languages, software design, or coding techniques. It is a book about being a software professional, and about managing and leading software professionals. It is a book about the state of software development as a profession, and about what we should aspire for it to become. All that, and it is an interesting read.
Continue reading “Professional Software Development – A Book Review” »
By arrangement with Amazon.com; we are now able to offer books for sale through the My 2 Cents Bookstore page. So it is, that over this long holiday weekend, I’ve spent many hours wading through the full catalog of Amazon; looking for a selection of books that would be well suited to the readers of this site. If I can’t grow the readership simply through my writings perhaps the holidays will inspire droves of christmas shoppers to seek us out when looking for gifts for their favorite ultra-geek.
As I’ve said before, MC/DC analysis is the bane of Level-A development under DO-178B. It is not well understood, either by developers or by verification engineers. Automated analysis tools will perform the analysis, but that may not occur until verification has begun. Fixes at this stage are far less desirable than avoiding issues in the first place. So how do we ensure that MC/DC issues do not occur in the first place?
