Hardware and Software System Safety - Enhanced Condition Table

As the software in control and critical systems grow more complex, it is necessary to segregate certain critical portions of the code, which are involved with preventing major catastrophes and keeping the system alive from another code which may perform normal functions. This segregated portion of the code, which we refer to as the hard core, requires special verification measures beyond and above the normal practices of unit testing at the functional or structural levels. The usual structural testing techniques, such as task or branch testing, are inadequate for such software, and other methods must be used.
The ECT methodology can be applied at the specification level to create condition tables that can be compared with those implemented in the code. It can also be used for unit testing to define test cases.