Software Engineering

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CHAPTER 11 
Functional Analysis and Allocation Practice
Properly used, the software FMEA provides the development team several 
benefits, including:
1. 
Improved software dependability and quality.
2. 
Increased customer and stakeholder satisfaction.
3. 
Identifies and eliminates potential software failure modes early in the develop-
ment process when such design challenges can be cost-effectively regulated.
4. 
Emphasized failure detection and preventive measures.
5. 
Provides a focus for improved software test coverage.
6. 
Minimizes late design changes and their associated cost and schedule impacts.
7. 
Improves teamwork and idea exchange among development team members.
A complete FMEA for a software product should contend with failures arising from 
the computing environment hardware, external systems, and data processing trans-
actions, and their effects on the final system or operational processes. The software 
FMEA procedures should adhere to the following steps, adapted from IEC 60812
1
:
1. 
Define the software boundaries for analysis (accomplished during computa-
tional requirements analysis).
2. 
Understand the software requirements, functionality, and performance.
3. 
Develop the functional architecture representations (hierarchical decomposition 
and behavioral views).
4. 
Identify functional failure modes and summarize failure effects.
5. 
Develop criteria for successful failure detection, isolation, and recovery.