Serious errors can hide for years. Consequently, many are hesitant to employ software in safety-critical applications and all companies are finding the cost of correcting and improving software to be an increasing burden. This talk describes a procedure for inspecting software that consistently finds subtle errors in software that was believed to be correct. Reviewers exploit the hierarchical structure of the code rather than proceeding sequentially through the code. Reviewers focus on small sections of code, producing precise summaries that are used when inspecting other such sections.
Reviewers proceed systematically so that no case, and no section of the program, gets overlooked.
During the procedure, the inspectors produce and review mathematical documentation. The procedure was originally developed and used to inspect safety-critical software in a nuclear power plant, and then improved based on that experience. He is a member of the Communications Research Laboratory and Principal Investigator for the Telecommunications Research Institute of Ontario. He has been Professor at the University of Victoria, the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland. The author of more than 180 papers and reports, Dr. Parnas is interested in most aspects of computer system design.