Fundamentals of Dependable Computing for Software Engineers

John Knight is a professor of computer science at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, he was with NASA's Langley Research Center. Dr. Knight has been a recipient of the Harlan D. Mills award from the IEEE Computer Society and the Distinguished Service award from ACM's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT). He is an editorial board member of the Empirical Software Engineering Journal and was editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering from January 2002 to December 2005.

The book is an important addition to one’s bookshelf. … it is insightful, close to faultless, and a wonderful reference. Read it from front to back and cite it in your proposals and professional and scholarly papers. … This book can and should be taught as part of an undergraduate or graduate software engineering program. I wish it had been available when I was setting up a graduate software engineering program … .—Larry Bernstein, Computing Reviews, June 2012This book takes full advantage of the extensive work that has been undertaken over many years on the creation of a rich set of system dependability concepts. John Knight makes excellent use of these concepts in producing a very well-argued and comprehensive account, aimed squarely at software engineers, of the variety of dependability issues they are likely to find in real systems and of the strategies that they should use to address these issues. Appropriately qualified students who study this book thoroughly and computer professionals seeking a greater understanding of the various dependability-related problems that they have encountered already in their careers should gain much from this book. I therefore take great pleasure in enthusiastically recommending it to both classes of reader.—From the Foreword by Brian Randell, Newcastle University, UK

• Introduction. Dependability Requirements. Errors, Faults, and Hazards. Dependability Analysis. Dealing with Faults. Degradation Faults and Software. Software Dependability. Software Fault Avoidance in Specification. Software Fault Avoidance in Implementation. Software Fault Elimination. Software Fault Tolerance. Dependability Assessment. Bibliography.