Systems Safety Qualifications and Areas of Expertise
While performing a Software Safety Analysis for a Radio-Frequency-Initiated Detonator, we analyzed the hardware/software interface. We decided to go “outside the box” and analyze the circuitry which insured the microprocessor would come out of power-up reset correctly … turns out– it didn’t reset properly! The processor could therefore operate erratically, which could initiate an unexpected detonation!
The TLDHS Safety Tests had grown to over 100 pages of procedures. Understanding the software architecture led us to believe that some of these tests may be redundant.
We decided to thoroughly examine the code and uncovered many places in which different tests exercised the exact same code, using the same parameters and state information. We re-wrote the Safety Tests to remove all these redundancies.
The USMC changed the definition of “Troops in Contact“, a critical feature of the Software Safety design for the TLDHS. Removing all the places this data was referenced throughout the software would take many 100s of man-hours. It could also comprise the software, and thus would require extensive testing.
NSWC Crane needed a Software Safety Analysis on a detonation device and a subsequent presentation to both the Navy’s System Software Safety Technical Review Panel (SSSTRP) and the equivalent Army Safety board.
We were tasked to provide Safety Support for the Marine Corps GBOSS project. The Logistics team was required to insure that our product had a Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF) below a certain threshold. They used statistics to show that we would need to conduct 1000s of hours of testing. Since this was a complex and expensive system, this approach was going to require extending the schedule and adding $100,000s to the project cost.
We were invited to help develop a new Technical Information Report (TIR) for the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI), a standards organization. This report, TIR 32:2004, discussed Medical Device Software Risk Management.
© 2020 High Impact Services. All rights reserved.
© 2020 High Impact Services. All rights reserved.
