Let me
announce with my first intervention the birth of the "International
Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems" (IJCCBS, Inderscience
Publishers), which I am honoured to lead as the Editor in Chief.
http://www.inderscience.com/ijccbs/

In the following, some significant citations from the same (recent) issue of
IEEE Computer Magazine which are worth a thought.

"In complex systems, combinations of minor software defects can lead to
large system failures.
[…]
Defect prevention, detection, and containment are all important—none of these
techniques should be skipped in favor of any of the others. Even if, for
example, developers exhaustively verify all the engineering models used to
produce a safety-critical software system, it’s still wise to test the resulting
code as thoroughly as possible. There are simply too many steps in safety
critical software development to take anything for granted."

Gerard J. Holzmann,"Conquering Complexity," Computer, Vol.
40, No. 12, pp. 111-113, Dec. 2007.

Gerard J. Holzmann is a Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institute of Technology, where he leads the Laboratory for Reliable
Software.

"Modern programs are disastrously unreliable artifacts, but they needn’t
be that way. In no other complex device would we accept a degree of
unreliability comparable to that found in software. If we inaugurated a new
building only to find that disconnecting the elevator causes all the
fifth-floor faucets to turn on, or that changing a light bulb in the basement
results in a minor collapse in the east wing, we would probably hang the
architect by the toes. That we accept this and worse when it comes to software
doesn’t speak well of our profession’s technical culture: We seem to be the
first professionals for which quality is a secondary concern. It might not,
however, be too late to do something about it."

Simone Santini,"Making Computers Do More with Less," Computer, Vol.
40, No. 12, pp. 124, 122-123, Dec. 2007.

Simone Santini is an associate professor at the Universidad Autónoma de
Madrid, Spain.