Object-oriented-no panacea for safety

Author

Meeson, Reginald

Author_Institution

Inst. for Defense Anal., USA

fYear

1996

fDate

17-21 Jun 1996

Firstpage

171

Lastpage

175

Abstract

In recent safety analyses of embedded computer software we observed that “object oriented” does not necessarily imply safety. In fact, several aspects of widely practiced object oriented software development techniques can lead to decidedly unsafe software characteristics. Two principal sources of potentially unsafe software are identified: control over object and method visibility; and concurrency. Popular object oriented design approaches and programming languages appear weak in one or both of these areas. Verifying the safety of software designed with inadequate visibility control and poorly orchestrated concurrency was exceedingly difficult

Keywords

object-oriented programming; real-time systems; safety-critical software; concurrency; control over object; embedded computer software; object oriented design approaches; object oriented software development; potentially unsafe software; programming languages; safety analyses; unsafe software characteristics; Actuators; Concurrent computing; Hazards; Medical control systems; Power distribution; Programming; Safety devices; Software design; Software safety; Software systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computer Assurance, 1996. COMPASS '96, Systems Integrity. Software Safety. Process Security. Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference on

Conference_Location

Gaithersburg, MD

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3390-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CMPASS.1996.507885

Filename

507885