Ensuring software safety in safety critical domains

Embedded software applications are increasingly dominating safety critical domains. Software application safety has been overlooked for quite some time but more focus and attention is currently directed to this area and mandated by regulatory bodies due to the exponential growth of embedded applications in safety critical domains. In this paper, we introduce the motivations behind the industry´s focus on safety, categorize the existing causes of software errors in question, detail and evaluate legacy and ongoing research efforts towards ensuring safety in applications, discuss industrial regulatory bodies attempts towards safety, and finally conclude with an evaluation of current status to pinpoint shortcomings and possible future research directions towards this critical software engineering area.