The Role of Software in Accidents

5 The Role of Software in Accidents Assumption 5 Highly reliable software is safe. 

The most common approach to ensuring safety when the system includes software is to try to make the software highly reliable. To help readers who are not software professionals see the flaws in this assumption, a few words about software in general may be helpful. 

The uniqueness and power of the digital computer over other machines stems from the fact that, for the first time, we have a general-purpose machine  

It should not be surprising, then, that most errors found in operational software can be traced to requirements flaws, particularly incompleteness. Completeness is a 

Nearly all the serious accidents in which software has been involved in the past twenty years can be traced to requirements flaws, not coding errors. The requirements may reflect incomplete or wrong assumptions 

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