Measures and risk indicators for early insight into software safety

Software contributes an ever-increasing level of functionality and control in today's systems. This increased use of software can dramatically increase the complexity and time needed to evaluate the safety of a system. Although the actual system safety cannot be verified during its development, measures can reveal early insights into potential safety problems and risks. An approach for developing early software safety measures is presented in this article. The approach and the example software measures presented are based on experience working with the safety engineering group on a large Department of Defense program.