Towards a comprehensive consideration of epistemic questions in software system safety

For any software system upon which lives depend, the most important question one can ask about it is, 'How do we know the system is safe?' Despite the critical importance of this question, no widely accepted, generally applicable answer exists. Instead, debate continues to rage over the qu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in4th IET International Conference on System Safety 2009. Incorporating the SaRS Annual Conference p. 3A1
Main Authors Holloway, C.M, Johnson, C.W
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published Stevenage IET 2009
Subjects
Data security
Expert systems and other AI software and techniques
Software engineering techniques
epistemic question
software system safety
critical safety
knowledge based systems
safety-critical software
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Summary:For any software system upon which lives depend, the most important question one can ask about it is, 'How do we know the system is safe?' Despite the critical importance of this question, no widely accepted, generally applicable answer exists. Instead, debate continues to rage over the question, with theorists and practitioners quarrelling with each other and amongst themselves. This paper suggests a possible way forward towards quelling the quarrels, based on refining the critical safety question into additional questions, which may be more likely to have answers on which a consensus can be reached. (5 pages)
ISBN:1849191956
9781849191951
DOI:10.1049/cp.2009.1546