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Discussion on: Safety-Critical Software: 15 things every developer should know

 
bosepchuk profile image
Blaine Osepchuk

Thanks, Phil.

It's perfectly acceptable to go over and above the standards and do as much fuzz/dynamic/exploratory testing as you like. I don't think you would have much luck convincing regulators that it's a good substitute for MC/DC unit test coverage. But you could capture all the inputs that cause faults, fix the errors, and then add them to your official regression test suite.

Your SlideShare link appears to be broken. I'm curious to read what was there.

I've bookmarked your satellite project post and I'll read it when I get a minute. Writing code that either flies or runs in space is on my bucket list. I'm envious.

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

Ah ok, here's an InfoQ page on the topic that refers back to my favourite infosec speaker, Kelly Shortridge: infoq.com/news/2019/11/infosec-dev... The topic is Distributed, Immutable, Ephemeral (yep, DIE), using chaos engineering to defend information systems.

I get the envy reaction quite a bit :) - it was however plain luck that I was asked by a work colleague who is an AMSAT member to help out, and ended up with another friend writing firmware for a tiny CPU going to space.

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bosepchuk profile image
Blaine Osepchuk

Thanks for the updated link. Interesting article. I don't think the details of the technique are exactly applicable to safety-critical systems. But I have read about how complicated safety-critical systems with redundancies and fail-overs test how their systems respond to failures, disagreement in voting architectures, power brownouts, missed deadlines, etc. I suppose it would all fall under the banner of chaos engineering.

I doubt very much it was plain luck that you were asked to participate. I'm sure your engineering skills had something to do with your invitation.

Cheers.