Svarin, #784
By the way, if someone could please enlighten yours truly regarding the
certification process applied to flight controls computers software
versions released after the initial certification process, I would be
extremely grateful.
If you want to get an idea of what's involved in the development process,
you could google "DO178 standard" for a start. You probably won't find
the whole document unless you pay for it (expensive), but you will get a good
overview. It's not just about software development standards, but also
about the ways that the various parts of development chain link together, in
an effort to eliminate pathways that could result in errors. In the case of
software updates, full regression testing would be required and more to ensure
that changes in one area haven't broken anything else.
I think that if there were bugs (unlikely), they would be found at the level
of subsystem interaction, where timing issues and concurrency make it much
more difficult to model at the design stage. That in terms of the myriad
possible failure scenarios and their timing at the limits of
system capabilities. This would be a systems engineering, managing complexity
issue and not one of software as such. Seems very unlikely that there would
be any significant bugs in the individual subsystems, as their behaviour is
tightly defined and thus easier to model in design and subsequently testing...