Dependability Perspectives in Requirements Engineering

Systems engineering emphasizes the need of dependability in present and future computer systems. Even classical research environment on safety-critical systems have moved from reliability, safety, availability to dependability engineering as classical engineering approaches are moving from components to systems design. The 18 International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security, SAFECOMP ’99 [4], has registered an increasing interest on dependability, which resulted in a number of related papers ranging over various aspects of dependability from design and assessment to human factors. This paper explores three streams which have shown a crucial importance for dependability. The different views taken into account are the process, product and human perspectives. All of them are current research fields which emphasize the need of dependability in safety-critical computer systems, but at the same time they demand a deep understanding of the interrelations among the different views. Section 3 shows some preliminary results of my recent works. Section 4 finally draws some directions which represent a work plan for further work.