Licensing reliable embedded software for safety-critical applications

This article offers an overview on existing approaches for assessing the reliability of complex software with safety demands. It addresses both inherent difficulties as well as observable trends towards international standardized procedures. The contribution distinguishes between product-based and process-based quality indicators and comments on the applicability of existing techniques to evaluate them qualitatively and quantitatively. In particular, it focusses on licensing the re-use of pre-developed software components. In the light of lessons learnt from real-world accidents it proposes to adopt a procedure supporting the re-usability of component certification when licensing software systems for new safety applications.