Software Standards, Reliability, Safety, and Risk

Abstract

Software, more than anything else, is at the heart of the information communication infrastructure. It is in fact one of the three main components of the infrastructure, together with hardware and humanware, as we discussed before. Being at the core of this infrastructure we all depend on implies the importance we must put on the software component. In this chapter, we are going to focus on this role and how we can keep software safe, dependable, and secure, as we struggle to make the information communication infrastructure secure. For the remainder of this chapter, we are going to focus on the quality of the service of software products, causes of software failures, developer and buyer protection, and techniques for improving software quality.