It is, indeed, widely acceptable today that nowhere is it more important to focus on the improvement of software quality than in the case of systems with requirements in the areas of safety and reliability - especially for distributed, real-time and embedded systems. Thus, much research work is under progress in these fields, since software process improvement impinges directly on achieved levels of quality, and many application experiments aim to show quantitative results demonstrating the efficacy of particular approaches. Requirements for safety and reliability - like other so-called non-functional requirements for computer-based systems - are often stated in imprecise and ambiguous terms, or not at all. Specifications focus on functional and technical aspects, with issues like safety covered only implicitly, or not addressed directly because they are felt to be obvious; unfortunately what is obvious to an end user or system user is progressively less so to others, to the extend that a software developer may not even be aware that safety is an issue. Therefore, there is a growing evidence for encouraging greater understanding of safety and reliability requirements issues, right across the spectrum from end user to software developer; not just in traditional safety-critical areas (e.g. nuclear, aerospace) but also acknowledging the need for such things as heart pacemakers and other medical and robotic systems to be highly dependable.

Klappentext

The book includes a number of refereed papers, selected from those presented during the 3rd International Conference on Reliability, Quality and Safety of Software-Intensive Systems (ENCRESS '97) that took place in Athens, Greece, on 29-30 May, 1997. The book, first, provides its reader with state-of-the-art information on issues with a major importance to the researchers and professionals who are active in the area of software-intensive systems.

Inhalt
One Software Testing.- 1 Pythia: A regression test selection tool based on textual differencing.- 2 Provelt: A C-program correctness prover.- 3 An assessment of the number of paths needed for control flow testing.- Two Software Quality.- 4 Automating software quality modelling, measurement and assessment.- 5 A quality-intensive approach to software development.- Three Software Reliability.- 6 User-perceptions of embedded software reliability.- 7 Motivated humans for reliable software products.- Four Software Reusability.- 8 Specification composition for the verification of message passing program composition.- Five Safety Critical and Safety Monitor Systems.- 9 Prescriptive specification checking for hazard prevention in computer-controlled safety-critical systems.- 10 Object-oriented safety monitor synthesis.- 11 Modification of safety critical systems: an assessment of three approaches.- Six Software-Intensive Systems Security.- 12 Selected Legal Issues Related to Internet Use.- 13 Security of World Wide Web search engines.- 14 The Cascade vulnerability problem for open distributed systems: a review.- 15 Improving the quality of secure distributed systems.- Seven Applications and Experiences.- 16 Partnership with customers in product improvement: testing embedded software products in the field.- 17 Introducing the Goal-Question-Metric approach to telecommunications software development practices: the PITA experiment.- 18 Software development and testing for shipyard robotic welding.- 19 Testing software based on users' quality needs.- Eight Poster papers.- 20 An evaluation scheme of software testing techniques.- 21 Real-MFG: a Petrinet based model focusing on the integration of schedulability and fault tolerance.- 22 Design of an integrated educational softwaredevelopment environment oriented in reuse and quality assurance of products and processes.- 23 An approach to improve software quality in length measurement calibration.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.