RESAFE - International Workshop on Software Reuse and Safety

25 May 2008, Beijing, China

Held in conjunction with the Tenth International Conference on Software Reuse (ICSR 10)

This workshop and panel will build on the panel at the Eighth International Conference on Software Reuse and the workshop at the Ninth International Conference on Software Reuse in looking at the important topic of the interaction of software reuse and safety. Safety concerns the prevention of accidents, and is defined as an "emergent property that arises at the system level when components are operating together." Some hypothesis that have emerged are:

• Reuse of proven software may increase reliability, but has little or no effect on safety
• Reuse may even decrease safety because of the complacency it engenders
• Specific hazards of new implementation may not have been considered

Workshop Goal

The goal of the workshop is to determine which aspects of reuse affect safety, and to identify techniques for improving the safety of reusable assets, and the systems that incorporate them. The workshop should bring together practitioners from different domains to exchange experiences, to discuss current and emerging problems, and to construct an agenda for future work in this area.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include but are not restricted to:

• Where is safety and reuse currently addressed in international standards?
• What processes could ensure certifiable components?
• How can techniques such as  "wrappers" and "safety layers" be used to improve safety in component based systems?
• How can safety-related aspects of components be specified?
• Introduction and analysis of further case studies in which software reuse affected safety in critical systems.
• What are the legal aspects of reuse and safety, in particular concerning the issue of reliability versus safety?

Workshop Organization

The workshop will be organized as a one-day event. Position papers will be presented during the morning session, and discussed together with a number of pre-selected topics such as the myths of software safety presented in the SafeWare book.

A plenary presentation of principal results within the conference in the form of a panel  is planned.

Presentations should use specific examples to clarify the points being made, for example, using specific code components to show how they might be modified to make them safer. Examples:

• How could the Therac accidents have been avoided?
• How could the Ariane 5 accident have been avoided?

Resources and background material are available in another section of this site.

Instructions for participants

Potential participants are invited to submit position papers of no more than five pages, to either of the conference co-chairs John Favaro (john@favaro.net) or Bill Frakes (frakes@cs.vt.edu). Important dates:

Submission of Position Papers: 31 March 2008
Notification of Acceptance: 10 April 2008

Final position papers may be brought to the workshop.

Program Committee

John Favaro, Senior Consultant, Italy (Co-Chair)

Bill Frakes, Virginia Tech, USA (Co-Chair) 

Giancarlo Gennaro, Intecs S.p.A., Italy

B.J. Favaro, Cisco Systems, USA

Mike Tortorella, Rutgers University, USA

Patricia Rodriguez, SoftWCare, Spain

Workshop Organizers

John Favaro is European co-chair of the IEEE Technical Subcommittee on Reuse and a founding member of the steering committee of the Society for the Advancement of Software Education. He was General Chair of the Sixth International Conference on Software Reuse in June 2000, and is an associate editor of IEEE Software. Since 2004 he has been involved in the Verification and Validation of safety critical systems in the transport industry. He has a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Yale University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Bill Frakes is an associate professor in the computer science department at Virginia Tech. He chairs the IEEE TCSE committee on software reuse, and is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He has a B.L.S. from the University of Louisville, an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Syracuse University.