Trust Software With Your Safety? Software Reliability with Guest Wouter Geurts

If you were tasked with creating a software system that controls a critical piece of infrastructure--that is, a piece of infrastructure that is responsible for safeguarding the lives and property of citizens of a major city, how would you architect, build, and test such a system? Futhermore, what would you do to assess the reliability of such a system so you could sleep peacefully--trusting that this system would function when needed?

In this episode, we discuss software reliability with Wouter Geurts. Wouter helped assess the reliability of just such a system, specifically software for the Maeslantbarrier. The Maeslantbarrier is a storm surge barrier designed to help protect the Rotterdam harbor from flooding, it is one of the biggest moving structures on earth. This barrier automatically closes when needed. The software that provides the automation must, obviously, be engineered to be as reliable as possible.  Wouter helped create an approach for quantifying sotware reliability:  ‘TOPAAS’ (Task-Oriented Probability of Abnormalities Analysis for Software).

Listen to hear about techniques used to measure and improve the reliability of the system controlling the Maeslantbarrier, and to hear about techniques you might be able to apply to assess and improve your own system's reliability.

Listen now: (download)



References:
Wouter mentioned:

Handbook of Software Reliability Engineering

Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It

FM'99 - Formal Methods: World Congress on Formal Methods in the Development of Computing Systems

Functional Safety and IEC 61508

TOPAAS: An Alternative Approach to Software Reliability Quantification

Bett mentioned:  Using Z -- Specification, Refinement, and Proof

Russ mentioned: Code Smells

Also:

Meet us at: SATURN Conference 2014