Software Safety Metrics for Safety-Critical Computer Systems

Abstract

Software safety is a composite of many factors. The safety aspects of computer-based systems as increasingly important as the use of software escalate because of its convenience and flexibility. There are many tools and metrics for software safety. Many safety metrics exists to help designers to identify potential safety problems. The area of software metrics play an important role in improving the quality of the software process. It is very important to select and use appropriate software safety metrics in software engineering. This paper reviews the method for selecting appropriate software safety metrics based on AHP. AHP theory is a classical multi attribute decisionmaking method and is more flexible, accurate, and has better sensitivity and consistency. This paper describes a set of software safety metrics for each phase of software life cycle. The following software safety metrics such as “Fault Density”, “Test coverage”, “Defect density”, “Cyclomatic Complexity”, etc. are identified to evaluate the safer software development methodology. These metrics are used to evaluate the software safety for many applications.

Keywords: Software Safety, Software Safety Metrics, Safety Critical Systems

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