Software Fault Reporting Processes in Business-Critical Systems

to P1: This paper describes how methods taken from safety-critical practises can be used in development of business-critical software. The emphasis is on the early phases of product development, and on use together with the Rational Unified Process. One important part of the early project phases is to define safety requirements for the system. This means that in addition to satisfying the need for functional system requirements, non-functional requirements about system safety must also be included. By using information that already is required or produced in the first phases of RUP together with some suitable “safety methods”, we are able to produce a complete set of safety requirements for a business-critical system before the system design process is started. In P1, we showed how the Preliminary Hazard Analysis, Hazard and Operability Analysis and Safety Case methods can be used together in the RUP inception phase, to help produce a safety requirements specification, this is illustrated in Figure 4-1. The shown example is simple, but demonstrates how the combination of these methods will work in this context. By building on information made available in an iterative development process like RUP, we can use the presented methods to improve the process for producing a safety requirements specification. The paper also emphasizes that early development phases are prime candidates for efficient safety analysis work.