Operation Level Safety Analysis for Object Oriented Software Design Using SFMEA

Recent trends have indicated the increased use of object oriented technology not only for the design and development of traditional software but also for safety critical software. There has been an ongoing effort for the application of traditional well documented and well tested hardware safety and reliability analysis techniques to software. Software failure modes and effects analysis (SFMEA) is one such technique that has been adopted from its hardware counter part failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). Despite differences in operational failure modes between hardware and software, the recent research has shown the usefulness of the technique in software development process. This paper aims to: (i) highlight the application of SFMEA in object oriented design process and (ii) use the results of analysis obtained from previous step at implementation phase for improving robustness of the code.