Liability in Software Engineering: Overview of the LISE Approach and Illustration on a Case Study

Abstract

© ACM – 2010. This is the authors' pre-version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE international Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'10) - Volume 1 – 978-1-60558-719-6/10/05 – (May 2-8 – 2010) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1806799.1806823LISE is a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. This report provides an overview of the overall approach taken in the project based on a case study. The case study illustrates a situation where, in order to reduce legal uncertainties, the parties to a contract wish to include in the agreement specific clauses to define as precisely as possible the share of liabilities between them for the main types of failures of the system