In Section 11.2, I briefly described an air accident at Warsaw Airport where an Airbus crashed on landing. Two people were killed and 54 were injured. The subsequent inquiry showed that a major contributory cause of the accident was a failure of the control software that reduced the efficiency of the aircraft’s braking system. This is one of the, thankfully rare, examples of where the behavior of a software system has led to death or injury. It illustrates that software is now a central component in many systems that are critical to preserving and maintaining life. These are safety-critical software systems, and a range of specialized methods and techniques have been developed for safety-critical software engineering.
As I discussed in Chapter ...
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