tbolt

Testing Critical Software

Gene Spafford:

In the late 1980s, around the time the Airbus A340 was introduced (1991), those of us working in software engineering/safety used to exchange a (probably apocryphal) story. The story was about how the fly-by-wire avionics software on major commercial airliners was tested.

According to the story, Airbus engineers employed the latest and greatest formal methods, and provided model checking and formal proofs of all of their avionics code. Meanwhile, according to the story, Boeing performed extensive design review and testing, and made all their software engineers fly on the first test flights. The general upshot of the story was that most of us (it seemed) felt more comfortable flying on Boeing aircraft. (It would be interesting to see if that would still be the majority opinion in the software engineering community.)

Well that’s one way to do it.

Posted on June 16th, 2015