An Analysis of Factors Affecting Software Safety in the Aerospace Industry

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation of the factors that affect software safety based on an online survey with 99 practitioners from Chinese aviation organizations. The study proposes twenty potential factors covering five different categories (e.g., requirements, coding, testing, safety analysis, others). The survey focuses on the perspectives of the primary participants, managers, programmers, testers, consisting of a Likert scale evaluation of factors and questions about the participants' background. Many statistical analysis techniques, such as the relative weight method, correlation analysis, factor analysis and analysis of variance technique, are taken to analyze these factors. The findings are of great significance for further research and guidance on the development of safety-critical software. For practitioners, it provides estimates and quick guidance for software safety. The studies in this paper will be useful to the software safety community in aerospace industry as well as the wider software development community.