[SystemSafety] Collected stopgap measures

[Olwen Morgan]

You know that and I know that. You read standards and I read standards. 
The problem we have is that very few of our colleagues do the same.

I believe in generating ideas and then throwing them into a melee. 
Admittedly, in this case, it's open to all sorts of criticism. I'm just 
floating something to see if we could come up with something that might 
actually find its way into the skull of Joe Lumpenengineer. In fact, 
your email actually states things that could form part of a checklist.

But you're right if you think it smacks of desperation. We are 
confronted in our profession with habitual dysfunctional behaviours.

How much harm can it do? And that's not a rhetorical question.

Olwen


On 01/11/2018 19:56, Steve Tockey wrote:
> I do think this is a good idea in principle, but I don¹t think it is
> actually workable in practice. The problem is that unless the checklists
> are pretty high-level, e.g.,
>
> *) You need to have documented requirements
> *) You need to have a documented design
> *) You need to have controlled source code
> *) The documented design needs to be consistent with the documented
> requirements
> *) The controlled source code needs to be consistent with the documented
> design
> *) . . .
>
> At that high level, all you really end up with is something like DO-178C.
>
>
> On the other hand, if you want to be more prescriptive then decisions will
> have to be made about HOW to do certain of the activities. If you want to
> document your requirements using a cut-down structured method but I want
> to document the requirements using a cut-down OO method then our
> respective requirements checklists will be very different. So different,
> in fact, that one will be useless in the context of the other.
>
>
> My two cents,
>
> ‹ steve
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: systemsafety <systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
> on behalf of Olwen Morgan <olwen at phaedsys.com>
> Date: Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 8:34 AM
> To: "systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de"
> <systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
> Subject: [SystemSafety] Collected stopgap measures
>
>
> One thing that I sense (maybe wrongly?) from recent traffic is that a
> goodly few of us use our own favourite techniques to help plug the holes
> in weak development practices. Cut-down structured and OO methods seem
> to be a case in point. I'm sure there are others.
>
> Might there be some benefit in gathering here the tricks that many of us
> may have used when faced with inadequate processes. Call me
> simple-minded (many have called me worse) but I'm wondering if there
> would be value in what might be called a "Software Process Cookbook" of
> "Software Process Checklists" for high-integrity developments.
>
> True, I'd prefer something direct, technical and possibly rather dry but
> I'm thinking here about an appealing format. I'm wondering if something
> like a cookbook or "for Dummies" format would appeal to people who would
> otherwise never go near the sources that they need to be accessing to
> help them do the job better.
>
>
> Just a thought,
>
> Olwen
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> The System Safety Mailing List
> systemsafety at TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE
> Manage your subscription:
> https://lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/mailman/listinfo/systemsafety
>
>