Forwards to safety standards

It is common for the impression to be given that software engineers have stumbled on an issue unique to software and only understood by software engineers. This is not true, and the author discusses and demonstrates that the development of safety-related systems incorporating software needs a mixture of skills, outside software engineering, which are not commonly found in the development of other types of systems. There are international standards being developed to aid the developer, and there are cost-effective methods of testing and assessing safety without the resource to formal mathematical methods in every case. Both these developments are explored