This paper describes the Software Criticality Analysis (SCA) approach that was developed to support the justification of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) used in a safety-related system. The primary objective of SCA is to assess the importance to safety of the software components within the COTS and to show there is segregation between software components with different safety importance. The approach taken was a combination of Hazops based on design documents and on a detailed analysis of the actual code (100kloc). Considerable effort was spent on validation and ensuring the conservative nature of the results. The results from reverse engineering from the code showed that results based only on architecture and design documents would have been misleading.
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