VECoS

Abstract : The widespread use of software in critical and less-critical systems and their ever-increasing size and complexity pose a serious challenge to software providers and quality assurance practitioners. The problem is even exacerbated by the fact that software dependability is not only impacted by the nature of its residual faults (i. e. faults that escaped the validation and verification process), generally referred to as deterministic faults or bugs, but also and most importantly by the way the software is activated (i. e., the operational profile). Several complementary approaches are currently used to assess software dependability, based on modeling, field measurements or controlled experiments. The talk will review the main approaches to software dependability assessment, and highlight their benefits, complementarities, as well as their limitations. It will give examples of software dependability assessment related to real-life systems, and identify some research gaps.

Short bio: Karama Kanoun, Directeur de Recherche at LAAS-CNRS, is heading the research area on Crucial Computing at LAAS. Her research interests include modeling and evaluation of computer system dependability, considering hardware as well as software, and dependability benchmarking. She has co-directed the production of a book on Dependability Benchmarking for Computer Systems (IEEE Computer Society and Wiley, 2008). She chaired the Special Interest Group on Dependability Benchmarking of the IFIP working group 10.4 (2005-11), and was past Vice-chair of the IFIP WG10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance (2006-12). She has been the principal investigator of the DBench European project on Dependability Benchmarking (2000-04), and was in charge of the management of ReSIST, the European Network of Excellence on Resilience for Survivability (2006-09). She is chairing the Steering Committee of the European Dependable Computing Conference, and member of the Steering Committees of EEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering and IEEE International Conference on Software Security and Reliability. She served on the program committees of major international conferences on dependable computing, and was Program Committee (co)-Chair of SAFECOMP, ISSRE, DSN.