Software Dependability Engineering

Motivation

During the last few years, functionality and complexity of software products has been increasing dramatically. Customers require more and more functionality and especially high quality products tailored to their particular environment. Therefore, software development faces the challenge to reduce cost, effort, and time-to-market of the software products, but simultaneously ensuring the delivery of the required software product that fulfills the customer’s functional and especially quality expectations.

As a direct consequence, acceptable products may not satisfy all quality requirements perfectly, which is, however, rarely communicated explicitly and clearly – in particular among software practitioners. As a consequence, many software approaches are applied with the implicit intention of achieving “best” quality with respect to all kinds of product characteristics. This is not a problem as long as the typical process configurations always fully satisfy all product and project requirements. This can, however, only rarely be maintained in practice over a long period of time. Changes to functionality, technology, quality, or organization force development approaches to be continuously adapted or optimized.

Therefore, organizations need to understand how to explicitly model their various dependability requirements and how to define and use strategies to meet these requirements. Additionally they must understand the associated costs and trade-offs of different strategies.

The seminar addresses these needs by discussing various needs for dependability especially emphasizing dependability of end products over qualities of intermediate development artifacts. The workshop facilitates the discussion on how to integrate dependability requirements with organizational and project constraints.

During the workshop various groups will focus on selected aspects of software dependability engineering or approach it in various ways. Participants are invited to propose topics.