Bibliographic Information
Defense Electronics
August, 1987
"Making SDI Software Reliable Through Fault-Tolerant Techniques"
By Baron O.A. Grey
Main issues
- Difficulty of programming
- Use of methods such as redundancy testing and multiversion to reduce number of bugs
- Difficulty of testing and catching bugs in complex programs such as SDI
Abstract:
Can error-free software of the complexity of SDI be built using improved software engineering tools and practices? The consensus is that it cannot because of the impossibility of exhaustively testing all of a code's control paths within a reasonable amount of time. It is established that simple guidance and navigation software contains 10^18 paths; if
one could generate, execute and analyze one test per microsecond, it would still take over 330,000 years to completely test the software by trying all paths. Moreover, given that the underlying hardware is imperfect, it is not entirely clear that software can ever be error-free. The hardware also might include bugs in what one might consider to be error-free software. Methods are also discussed, such as multiversion and redundancy testing, which may be used to reduce the number of errors.
For Further Knowledge...
- For a further discussion on high-integrity systems and further references, click here.
- For summaries of a software failure, click here.
- For discussions on software reliability, click here
I Want To Read About...
