PROBLEM Safety culture relates to injuries and safety incidents in organizations, but is difficult to asses and measure. We describe a preliminary test of assessing an organization's safety culture by examining employee interpretations of organizational safety artifacts (safety signs). METHOD We collected data in three organizations using a new safety culture assessment tool that we label the...

Software safety testing focuses on whether safety-critical software under test fulfills corresponding safety specifications. But unfortunately, it is very difficult to test software safety by using traditional operational reliability demonstration testing methods. The main reason is that different failures may have different impacts on safety. Damage size of a failure is a classified measuremen...

Cooperative vehicular communication systems are being developed to improve traffic safety and efficiency through the wireless exchange of information between vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure units. The future deployment of cooperative active safety applications requires their prior extensive testing due to their critical nature and strict quality of service requirements. Such te...

For avionic systems, the safety requirements are stricter than for non-safety critical systems due to the severe consequences a failure could cause. Depending on the consequences of a failure, the software needs to fulfill different testing criterias. More critical software needs more extensive testing. The question is whether the extra testing activities performed for software of higher critic...

Mutation testing has been used to assess test suite coverage, and researchers have proposed adapting the idea for other uses. Safety kernels allow the use of untrusted software components in safetycritical applications: a trusted software safety kernel detects undesired behavior and takes remedial action. We propose to use specification mutation, model checking, and model-based testing to verif...

This paper argues that the “safety verification” of a safety-related software system needs to be distinguished from the task of verifying that the behaviour of the system conforms to the requirements. Limitations of requirements-based testing are discussed. The main characteristics of a hazard-driven approach to safety testing of software-intensive systems are outlined. This paper also briefly ...