An ontological approach to systematization of SW-FMEA

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a widely used dependability and safety technique aiming at systematically identifying failure modes, their generating causes and their effects on the system. While FMEA has been mainly thought for hardware systems, its use is also advocated for software (SW-FMEA). This involves several major challenges, such as the complexity of functional requirements, the difficulty to identify failure modes of SW components, the elusive nature of faults. We present an approach for efficient and effective manipulation of data involved in the SW-FMEA process, introducing an ontological model which formalizes concepts involved in the analysis. The methodology provides a common conceptual framework supporting cohesion across different stages of a development life-cycle, giving a precise semantics to concepts collected in the artifacts of an industrial documentation process. This also opens the way to the implementation of a tool, built on top of a stack of semantic web technologies, for automating the SW-FMEA process. Results of the application of the methodology and the tool to a real scenario, in which activities and documents are regulated by well-established standards, are reported. The experience proves the suitability and the practical effectiveness of the approach, showing improvements on SW-FMEA practices.