Failure Assessment

Failure assessment encompasses the identification and characterization both of potential failure mechanisms in systems under development and of actual failure occurrences in operational systems. This paper presents several of the most widely used and useful techniques for failure assessment across the system lifecycle with an emphasis on the role of software. For each technique the paper describes its purpose and background, summarizes the process of performing the technique, and evaluates the technique’s strengths and limitations. The discussion provides lessons learned from practice, examples from spacecraft applications, and pointers to additional work in the field. The paper describes some of the tools that are available to help the practitioner select and implement failure assessment techniques and identifies likely future directions in failure assessment.