Software safety: current status and future direction

This paper describes the current status of software safety in terms of research and existing standards. It highlights the differences between various standards set up by government agencies to accomplish the same safety objectives. For example, European standards tend to place more emphasis on static analysis whereas American standards prefer dynamic testing to verify the software. An optimal verification approach is still a debatable issue in the software safety community. As for future direction, the author believes that the key to making safer and cheaper software is to have better requirements validation that ensure that the requirements are correct and complete before the design and coding phases begin.