A Comparison of Two Approaches to Safety Analysis Based on Use Cases

  • Tor Stålhane
  • Guttorm Sindre
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 4801)

Abstract

Engineering has a long tradition in analyzing the safety of mechanical, electrical and electronic systems. Important methods like HazOp and FMEA have also been adopted by the software engineering community. The misuse case method, on the other hand, has been developed by the software community as an alternative to FMEA and preliminary HazOp for software development. To compare the two methods misuse case and FMEA we have run a small experiment involving 42 third year software engineering students. In the experiment, the students should identify and analyze failure modes from one of the use cases for a commercial electronic patient journals system. The results of the experiment show that on the average, the group that used misuse cases identified and analyzed more user related failure modes than the persons using FMEA. In addition, the persons who used the misuse cases scored better on perceived ease of use and intention to use.

Keywords

Safety engineering FMEA misuse cases experiment 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tor Stålhane
    • 1
  • Guttorm Sindre
    • 1
  1. 1.Dept. of Computer and Info. Science, Norwegian Univ. of Sci. and Tech (NTNU)Norway

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