Many ‘failures’ in software-intensive organisational systems result from human actions or inaction so, to reduce the possibility of such ‘failures’ and so improve system dependability, it is important to adopt a holistic view where system designers consider the environment in which a system will be used as well as the technical characteristics of the system itself.

In this talk, I will introduce the notion of responsibility modelling, which aims to represent the responsibilities of human and automated agents in a complex system, where the system may be created by integrating different systems from different agencies. The motivation for the work is that many ‘system failures’ are actually failures of agents in the system to fulfil their expected responsibilities and so responsibility modelling offers the opportunity to analyse how responsibilities are distributed and to identify responsibility vulnerabilities, before these lead to system failure.

Bio

 Ian Sommerville has been Professor of Computer Science at St Andrews University since 2006. For more details see http://www.software-engin.com.