Taxonomy Based Testing and Validation of a new Defect Classification for Health Software

Defect-based testing is a powerful tool for finding errors in software. Many software manufacturers avoid this method because it requires a detailed defect taxonomy that is expensive to construct and difficult to validate. The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) is developing SW911, a defect taxonomy to be published as a standard for health software. This paper details three methods to validate SW91 for its comprehensiveness. The initial validations of SW91 were conducted via mapping vulnerabilities from the Common Weakness Enumeration and a dataset from a medical device software development company in Ireland. Taxonomy based testing is another validation method proposed in this research and its applicability was investigated using empirical data from a medical device software development company in Ireland. Finally, the paper details future plans to implement taxonomy based testing to improve software quality in medical device software and to validate SW91. This validation will focus on the efficiency, reliability, ability to perform useful analyses and defect coverage of SW91

Benefits of defect taxonomies and validation of a new defect classification for health software

Defect-based testing is a powerful tool for finding errors in software, including medical device software. Many software manufacturers avoid this method because it requires a detailed defect taxonomy that is expensive to construct and difficult to validate. SW911 is new defect taxonomy for health software being developed by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. This paper explains how defect taxonomies have been used and the benefits to industry. The initial steps of the validation of SW91 include mapping vulnerabilities from the Common Weakness Enumeration and a dataset from a medical device software development company in Ireland. Finally, the paper details future plans for validation, including taxonomy based testing which will be used to validate the efficiency, reliability, ability to perform useful analyses and defect coverage of SW91

DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study

In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Products that include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the non-safety critical parts. For such products, the ability to develop safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage. In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on {a mixed method approach}. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution candidates for guiding future research.Comment: Accepted at Euromicro Conf. on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications 2018, Prague, Czech Republi