High-confidence software evolution

High-Confidence Medical Device Software Development

The design of bug-free and safe medical device software is challenging, especially in complex implantable devices. This is due to the device's closed-loop interaction with the patient's organs, which are stochastic physical environments. The life-critical nature and the lack of existing industry standards to enforce software validation make this an ideal domain for exploring design automation c...

High Confidence Software and Systems Research Needs

ions and Mechanisms. New abstractions are needed to simplify the incorporation of robustness into high confidence systems. New mechanisms that allow systems to tolerate various types of faults and anomalies while continuing to satisfy other high confidence properties are needed. Existing fault tolerance methods need to be rethought to accommodate operation under real-time and security constrain...

Attaining High Confidence in Software Reliability Assessment

It is a cruel reality that the goal of producing “perfect software” remains elusive. When software is part of a critical system, it is necessary to estimate the risk associated with its use. Software reliability is defined as the probability of failure free execution given a specific environment and a fixed time interval. The goal of reliability assessment is not just to estimate the failure pr...

Container Services for High Confidence Software

For high-confidence systems, substantial effort is expended to ensure that the system will behave in an expected manner. This paper presents the position that a commercial off the shelf Enterprise JavaBeansTM (EJBTM) container can be extended to constrain the behavior of high confidence software. These extensions are based on techniques that are not new; developers of high confidence software u...

Towards high confidence medical device software