[SystemSafety] A Fire Code for Software?

[Ferrell, Uma D.]

I do agree that different sectors are maturing at different rates and the reason may not be always cultural.  There are other stress factors such as increased complexity, global competition (to be first to market), pressure from stockholders, global teams working with different goals etc.  I still think that the software industry in general is behind because of the nature of the product not as obvious as a tactical product, and some isolation in some industry between the context of the software and the software itself. As always, some  are more mature than others.

-----Original Message-----
From: GRAZEBROOK, Alvery N [mailto:alvery.grazebrook at airbus.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2018 12:07 PM
To: Ferrell, Uma D. <uferrell at mitre.org>; systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: RE: [SystemSafety] A Fire Code for Software?

To pick you up on one comment:
[snip]
>  In case of safety critical software it is the culture that is way behind.  
[snip]

This may be true for some industry sectors, but clearly isn't true for all. I don't know if you've read the Charles Perrow "Normal Accidents" book, but he makes it very clear that different industry sectors had very different safety cultures (he wrote the book 30 years ago). I'm sure the individual sector's cultures have evolved since then, but the overall picture is still similar. 
 
Much though we might like to think that there is some common culture around safety critical software as if it is one discipline, it is clear to me that the dominant culture is the culture of the industry commissioning the software, not the culture around our safety critical software discipline.

Cheers,
	Alvery

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