Source: Technical Lessons from QF32
Archives For Dissimilar Redundancy
Unreliable airspeed events pose a significant challenge (and safety risk) because such situations throw onto aircrew the most difficult (and error prone) of human cognitive tasks, that of ‘understanding’ a novel situation. This results in a double whammy for unreliable airspeed incidents. That is the likelihood of an error in ‘understanding’ is far greater than any other error type, and having made that sort of error it’s highly likely that it’s going to be a fatal one. Continue Reading…
Revisiting the Knight, Leveson experiments
In the through the looking glass world of high integrity systems, the use of N-version programming is often touted as a means to achieve extremely lower failure rates without extensive V&V, due to the postulated independence of failure in independently developed software. Unfortunately this is hockum, as Knight and Leveson amply demonstrated with their N version experiments, but there may actually be advantages to N versioning, although not quite what the proponents of it originally expected.
How do ya do and shake hands, shake hands, shake hands. How do ya do and shake hands and state your name and business…Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass
You would have thought after the Leveson and Knight experiments that the theory that independently written software would only contain independent faults was dead and buried, another beautiful theory shot down by hard cold fact. But unfortunately like many great errors the theory of n-versioning keeps on keeping on (1).
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