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Identifying Software Hazards with a Modified CHAZOP

Authors:
Bernhard Hulin
Rolf Tschachtli

Keywords: HAZOP; deviation; parameter-manifestation; hazards

Abstract:
CHAZOP is one of the most popular methods for identifying hazards of software. However, the classical HAZOP methodology as well as the CHAZOP methodology has four technical insufficiencies when applied to software: Ambiguity, incompleteness, nonsensicality and redundancy of HAZOP expressions. This present paper shows a modification of CHAZOP to overcome these insufficiencies. The reasons for these insufficiencies are a non-specified HAZOP language and missing guide words. We therefore, define a HAZOP language and identify missing guide words. The definition of the language is based on the items: Actions, objects, and their attributes. In contrast to the classical HAZOP, the modification defines rules for combining these items with guide words. One of the key ideas of the language is to use HAZOP parameters twice whenever possible: As objects and as attributes. In practice, this means that an attribute is additionally analyzed as if it were a software variable. We call this concept manifestation since in our new method attributes are also manifested in variables. For evaluation, the modified method is compared with the traditional one with the example of a safety-relevant software-controlled system using the windows registry. By means of this example, it is shown that more hazards can be found with the modified CHAZOP than with traditional method.

Pages: 7 to 12

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: April 17, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3700

ISBN: 978-1-61208-132-8

Location: Budapest, Hungary

Dates: from April 17, 2011 to April 22, 2011