Disaster Hardening for Software Systems

Summary form only given. We can treat the software system development as a ´disaster-prone´ system. We consider a crash as an example of a disaster. We consider the minimum infrastructural requirements based on the application, and the operational and user environments. We review the strategies of disaster awareness, anticipation, proactive pre-emption, and precaution to prevent and/or mitigate the effects of the major or minor catastrophes. We survey methods used in software quality improvements and show their applicability to activities in disaster mitigation and control. We illustrate these with examples using the CMM, sigma six and Taguchi-based ideas which show that mutual exchange of concepts enrich the important fields of software development and disaster control and mitigation. We conclude by identifying the important overlap between the two areas of software development and disaster mitigation. The software change management and maintenance methods can greatly benefit by ideas from disaster technology. The software developed under damage and disaster control techniques can be robust, resilient and long lasting