Assurance Cases (Podcast Series)

So, before talking about assurance cases, I need to talk a little bit about safety cases because assurance cases are a generalization of the idea of a safety case. The safety case, of course, is a means of justifying that a system will meet its safety properties. It was realized along the way that the same ideas could be applied to properties like security or reliability or usability or any of the -ilities or any attribute you would care to apply it to. So, we renamed it assurance cases. Its not just us; its the community-at-large thats doing work in the area of assurance cases. The assurance case is similar to a legal case in structure. The term case in the assurance case or safety case is meant to evoke a case in the same sense as legal case. Just as a lawyer makes an argument based on evidence that his client is innocent, or a prosecutor makes an argument presumably based on the same evidence that the client is guilty, an engineer would make an argument based on some evidencefor instance, testing results, static analysis, formal proofs or what have youbut the system that he has developed is safe or secure or reliable or whatever claim they are after.