[SystemSafety] UL4600 - another sink hole solution

[Les Chambers]

So there is this farmer in South Australia who finds a hole in his field so he shovels in 
some dirt to level it off. But the hole just gets bigger so he throws in some old farm 
implements but that doesn't solve the problem either. The hole enlarges with every 
attempt to fill it. Finally he realises it's a sinkhole with a massive subterranean lake 
below.
Some months later legendary diver and documentary filmmaker Ben Cropp hears the 
story and dives the lake. The water is pristine and clear. At least 200 feet deep. And 
at the bottom he can see the pitiful pile of farm implements that constituted the 
farmer's hole filling solution.
This is what we are looking at with UL 4600 and the conga line of its ilk. Don't get me 
wrong I'm a big supporter of all these standards. I've seen them drag many a software 
shop out of the primordial slime. And thanks to Phil Koopman for the excellent 
overview, I know how hard that is to do. 
But the reality is they're too high level and too easy to game and too often become 
the subject of games and most tragic of all - when in the hands of rampaging 
capitalists in relentless pursuit of filthy lucre - too easy to ignore (Boeing?).
After 46 years in the business I admit to being slightly depressed about our 
profession's unwillingness to engage with our ever-growing problems of size and 
complexity. The battalions of devils in the armies of details that describe our ever 
enlarging code bodies.
Correct by Construction and inspired reuse of certified architectures and code are the 
only solutions.
Together with the mother of all have-you-thought-of-this checklists (an endearing UL 
4600 feature - to small though , it needs to be a petabyte data set). 
Unfortunately none of this will ever work without a classification scheme that makes 
all this information accessible by less-than-senior developers. The construction 
industry has Building Information Modelling (BIM) that, among other things, classifies 
every element that goes into a building supporting modelling before the fact.
Where is our software/system ontology? Are there any standards nerds willing to take 
on that challenge? BIM cleaned up multistorey building construction, we can do the 
same.
I write code all day and every day I benefit from stack overflow - code fragments, best 
practices and the like. I currently need literacy in six languages in none of which I will 
ever be expert. But thanks to stack overflow I've survived without making any major 
mistakes (so far). There are roughly 23,000,000 software developers in the world, this 
site gets 50,000,000 hits a month. It must have a massive influence on code 
developed on planet Earth. We need something like this in safety critical software, 
maybe curated but maybe not. And preferably based on an ontology that helps you 
find things sharpish like.

So I wish we'd just stop throwing farm implements down a sinkhole and engage with 
our problems at the scale of a stack overflow. Measures that actually stand a chance 
of solving the never-ending software crisis.

Cheers
Les

PS: And furthermore when are we going to admit that the greatest threat to safety we 
have today is nonengineers running engineering intensive companies - Boeing. 
Check your safety case. Do you have a strategy for dealing with over emphasis on 
creating shareholder value at the expense of safety? Above your pay grade? No it's 
not. It just killed 346 people.
Solution: UL/IEC/EN nnnnnn Standard for Analysis and Rectification of Organisational 
Safety Culture. 


> On 7/9/2020 at 4:12 PM, "Martyn Thomas" <martyn at thomas-associates.co.uk> 
wrote:
> >
> >Is it possible to get a copy without paying several hundred 
> >dollars?
> >
> >Martyn
> >
> >Martyn Thomas CBE FREng
> >Fellow, Gresham College
> 
> I recall that you can browse an online version for free (maybe following
> some registration), but the paper copies are expensive. I only knew
> about UL4600 because Philip Koopman did a video presentation on it
> which I found on LinkedIn. The link to the YouTube version is here.
> 
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2s8qbZ8g8M&feature=youtu.be>
> 
> It is, I think, a carefully considered presentation that certainly lays out
> the essential steps and considerations. Well worth the watch.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Paul E. Bennett IEng MIET
> Systems Engineer
> Lunar Mission One Ambassador
> -- 
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--
Les Chambers
les at chambers.com.au
+61 (0)412 648 992