Software Engineering Institute

Challenging problems associated with the increasing complexity of software systems are threatening industry's ability to build the next generation of safety-critical embedded systems. Using the current best practice of building and then testing software-reliant mission- and safety-critical systems, 80% of requirements and architecture design flaws are discovered after unit testing. This late discovery of design flaws can result in rework cost that exceeds 50% of the total system cost. Contributors to these problems include the growth of software, system integration, and interaction complexity exacerbated by ambiguous, missing, incomplete, and inconsistent requirements.