There are a number of approaches to the evaluation of software safety. Any serious study of safety issues in reusable software must be informed by an understanding of the issues in software safety.

The certification of software components is both a practical and a research issue. In order to study component certification, however, it is necessary to understand what to certify components against - recognized standards for software safety.

There is a substantial amount of literature related to safety-related software in general. Some of it is more relevant to safety issues in software reuse; some is less relevant. We try to help the reader interested in software reuse and safety to navigate the literature.

There are few available, worked out examples of reusable software safety evaluation. This subsection gathers together representative examples.