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Software FMEA: a learning experience

Published: 24 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Product quality is the biggest influencer that determines the bottom-line in a commodity business like consumer electronics. And in a domain like medical industry, the quality/reliability is even more paramount as it directly deals with the safety of human lives. A technique like FMEA (Failure modes and effects analysis) is very useful in such an endeavor to identify potential failure modes and design weaknesses, assess the risk of failures and provide for preventive/corrective actions. This has been proven in the hardware industry for years and a standard practice in those disciplines.
Software is at the heart of all the products and services, be it consumer devices, medical devices, or banking services etc. In order to provide a reliable and error free product/service it is essential that the potential risks/issues are anticipated well in advance during the requirements/design phase itself and prevented from occurring during the user experience. FMEA is an ideal technique that can be used to accomplish this. However the adoption of this mechanism is relatively nascent in the software industry and copying it as-is from hardware can make this exercise very counter-productive and render it less useful.
The fundamental question then is -- does this time-proven technique of FMEA really work in a software development scenario? And if yes how is this done? Are there any pitfalls that software teams should be aware of when doing an FMEA? This paper is an attempt to answer all these questions by assimilating the learning's out of defining and deploying software FMEAs. The paper begins by positioning FMEA in the software life cycle, details out the process steps and tailored definitions that can be used in software with some results. The essence of this paper is really the lessons learnt from the experience of deploying FMEAs in various software development projects.

References

[1]
Failure modes and effects analysis of software based-automation systems, Haapanen Pentti & Helminen Atte, Stukyto-tr 190/August 2002
[2]
ISO 13485: 2003, Medical devices -- Quality Management Systems -- System requirements for regulatory purposes
[3]
CMMI® for development v1.2. August 2006 Reference: CMU/SEI-2006-R-008 ESC-R-2006-008CMMI Product team http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/06tr008.pdf

Cited By

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  • (2013)Quality, timeliness and reliability in software medical devices-experience2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering (QR2MSE)10.1109/QR2MSE.2013.6625524(5-8)Online publication date: Jul-2013

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ISEC '11: Proceedings of the 4th India Software Engineering Conference
February 2011
229 pages
ISBN:9781450305594
DOI:10.1145/1953355
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Computer Society of India: Computer Society of India

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 February 2011

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Author Tags

  1. FMEA
  2. detection
  3. occurrence
  4. severity

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  • Short-paper

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ISEC '11
Sponsor:
  • Computer Society of India
ISEC '11: Indian Software Engineering Conference
February 24 - 27, 2011
Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

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Overall Acceptance Rate 76 of 315 submissions, 24%

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  • (2013)Quality, timeliness and reliability in software medical devices-experience2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering (QR2MSE)10.1109/QR2MSE.2013.6625524(5-8)Online publication date: Jul-2013

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