Four Pillars for Improving the Quality of Safety-Critical Software-Reliant Systems
April 2013 • White Paper
Peter H. Feiler, John B. Goodenough, Arie Gurfinkel, Charles B. Weinstock, Lutz Wrage
This white paper presents an improvement strategy comprising four pillars of an integrate-then-build practice that lead to improved quality through early defect discovery and incremental end-to-end validation and verification.
Abstract
Studies of safety-critical software-reliant systems developed using the current practices of build-then-test show that requirements and architecture design defects make up approximately 70% of all defects, 80% of which are discovered late in the development lifecycle. We present four pillars of an improvement strategy for an integrate-then-build practice that result in early defect discovery and increased confidence through incremental end-to-end system validation and verification throughout the lifecycle.