Software FMEA is one of the several safety analysis tools that can be used during software development process to analyze software defects and their effects and take preventive measures to improve the reliability of software and the products that cont...
Software FMEA is one of the several safety analysis tools that can be used during software development process to analyze software defects and their effects and take preventive measures to improve the reliability of software and the products that contain them. Nevertheless, software FMEA is subjective to the knowledge and experience of the performing organization and has limitations in that it is not quantitative, and in some cases, software FMEA is sometimes mistakenly perceived as a just formal procedure. In addition, in order to perform software FMEA, it is necessary to analyze customer requirements, and then system and software architecture design. However, the actual software development practice is often not very systematic. This paper presents a new method for integrating software architecture design and software FMEA. Among seven steps of software FMEA presented in AIAG-VDA 2019, the core concept of this integrated methodology is to add a new signal analysis process between functional analysis (step 3) and failure analysis (step 4). By performing structural analysis, functional analysis, and signal analysis in turn, the integrated software FMEA yields a software architectural design also. Then, it is possible to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of software FMEA by performing conventional failure analysis, risk analysis, and optimization with the software architecting results such as task time, input and output variables, and task order for each software element, It may be possible to link software FMEA results to test cases for software verification in the future, and it is expected that it will be possible to create an opportunity to extend the linkage to dependent failure analysis which was performed as a different safety analysis from software FMEA. By doing so, it can be utilized as a way to improve consistency and traceability from software architecture design to test case creation.