The purpose of this exercise is to analyze life-rated systems that failed in order to understand the root causes of the failures, particularly as the failures related to the definition of valid requirements.
Directions
Find an example of at least one life-rated system (such as air traffic control, medical devices, emergency response services) that have had significant problems due to lack of understanding of requirements. Science Direct and IEEE in the Georgetown Library online (access via Canvas) are good sources for such examples. Discuss the lessons learned. Did the requirements team devote enough time to working with the end users? Did the developers understand what was meant in the requirements document sufficiently enough to implement the system? What would you do differently?
You may use any of the resources listed below if you can’t easily find a good resource of your own to analyze:
- Walker, L. (2014, October 20). FCC Report Details Major 911 Outage as America Updates Emergency Services Systems
- Sentry Siren Inc. (2013) Taken from http://www.sentrysiren.com/emergency-alert-system-fails-again-did-this-failure-cost-lives/(Links to an external site.)
- Lutz, R. (1993). Analyzing Software Requirements Errors in Safety-Critical, Embedded Systems. http://sunset.usc.edu/classes/cs599_2001/isre93.pdf(Links to an external site.). Retrieved July 8, 2015.
- Jan Horsky, M. M. (Jul/Aug 2005). Comprehensive Analysis of a Medication Dosing Error. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Associa, Volume 12 Numb 4.
- Han, Y.Y., Carcillo, J.A., Venkataraman, S.T., Clark, R.S.B., Watson, R.S., Nguyen, T.C., Bayir, H., & Orr R.A. (2005). Unexpected increased mortality after implementation of a commercially sold computerized physician order entry system. Pediatrics 2005;116:1506-1512. doi:10.1542/peds.2005-1287
- Eric Wong, Xuelin Li, Philip A. Laplante,”Be more familiar with our enemies and pave the way forward: A review of the roles bugs played in software failures”, Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 133, 2017,Pages 68-94, ISSN 0164-1212, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2017.06.069.
- Report of the New Year’s Day 2017 Computer Aided Dispatch System Outage. Click here to access report(Links to an external site.).
- Thimbleby, H. (2015). Safer user interfaces: A case study in improving number entry. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 41(7), 711-729.
- Cauchi, A., Thimbleby, H., Oladimeji, P., & Harrison, M. (2013, September). Using medical device logs for improving medical device design. In 2013 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)(pp. 56-65). IEEE.
Your responses to this discussion prompt must be no fewer than 300 words (per question). Include at least two (2) scholarly citations from a scholarly literature in APA format. Your response must have a clear, well-formulated thesis; sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, and spelling count. Your response should be insightful, thoughtful, and analytical.