Abstract—Organizations are more interested in delivering the software product within a limited time frame with more profitability. Hierarchical positions in the organization, from top to bottom define constraints for non-disclosure of information in view of the safety of the entire organization, resulting in poor flow of information, causing incomplete understanding of the desired safety measures, at the lowermost level. Mere understanding the problem by the peer does not ensure understanding the degree of severity and importance of the software care, needs to be flown to the bottom level of software development personnel with magnificent visualization and illustration. The developing team would be under pressure for delivering the ultimate product under compelling reasons, causing negligence or ignorance to critical issues involved, thereby exposing the problems, during software implementation. Software development team has incomplete knowledge of safety and organization has incomplete knowledge of software behavior and its life cycle. This paper proposes integrated typical structure of information flow and reviews in a cyclical way for continuous evaluation and validation through specialized team for developing safety critical software. Software Safety greatly depend on adequate salient information flows, with detailed consequences of failures and their effects, down to developmental team, and their characteristic importance of assignment. Organization behavior and software safety though both are independent but are of intricate nature having effects on both sides, such as software behavior and organization safety on the other hand. Thus neither of these should be ignored. In this paper we critically analyze various organizational factors and software safety factors having interaction between them. An amalgamated design is suggested in between these independent domains. This model is applied to laboratory prototype of RTCS (Road Traffic Control System). The results have inferred that all safety critical operations were safe and risk free, adequate to handle contingent situations arising out of practices.
Index Terms—Safety-Critical Systems, Software Safety, Software Quality, Road Traffic Control System (RTCS).
P. V. Srinivas Acharyulu is with IT Department, as Assistant Engineer (IT), NTPC Limited (A Government of India Enterprise). He is at present pursuing part-time doctoral degree in Computer Science & Systems Engineering from GITAM University, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India. (email:pvschari@yahoo.com)
Dr. P. Seetharamaiah is with Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Andhra University College of Engineering, Visakhapatnam- 530 003, Andhra Pradesh–India. (email: psrama@gmail.com).
Cite: P. V. Srinivas Acharyulu and P. Seetharamaiah, "Inserting Safety into Software – Safety Critical Systems –Management Perspective," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 150-156, 2011.