Software Engineering Institute

Safety-critical software must be analyzed and checked carefully. Each potential error, failure, or defect must be considered and evaluated before you release a new product. For example, if you are producing a quadcopter drone, you would like to know the probability of engine failure to evaluate the system's reliability. Safety analysis is hard. Standards such as ARP4761 mandate several analyses, such as Functional Hazard Assessment and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. One popular type of safety analysis is Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), which provides a graphical representation of all contributors to a failure (e.g., error events and propagations). In this podcast, Julien Delange discusses the concepts of the FTA and introduce a new tool to design and analyze fault trees.