Software Interface Failure Modes and Effect Analysis Based on UML

Software is widely used in equipment control, signal processing, communication and other fields. In today´s world, we should pay more attention to its quality needs. Interface is one weak-link in large-scale software design. In order to improve software quality, we need to enhance interface quality work, including management, analysis, design, test methods etc. FMEA (Failure Modes and Effect Analysis) is a common quality analysis tool which has been used in software developing progress, but the progress is ineffective. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardized modeling language. It provides a unified tool for software developers of different domains. Even if quality engineers do not involve in software design, they can understand software functions and design it by UML files. In this paper, we apply FMEA to software interface quality analysis, analyze the problems in the previous SFMEA application, investigate the possibility of SIFMEA based on UML (Unified Modeling Language) , discuss the feasibility of using UML diagrams and introduce the approach and steps of SIFMEA utilizing different UML diagrams. At last, the method´s effectiveness is proved by an flight control system example.