[IGSTK-Developers] Crash recovery?

[David Gobbi]

Andinet Enquobahrie wrote:

> Tina Kapur wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Does IGSTK have a mechanism for crash recovery?  I was making a wish 
>> list of
>> what such a toolkit should have, and I can see how the logging mechanism
>> could be used for recovery from a mid surgery crash, but just wanted to
>> check if the feature was planned for anytime in the near future.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> -Tina
>
> Hi Tina,
>
> We hope that the toolkit wont crash in the middle of a surgery...may 
> be before or after :) But on a serious note, the main reason the state 
> machines were introduced in IGSTK is to make it "ideally" 100% 
> predictable. All error conditions and scenarios should be handled by 
> the state machines. IGSTK should be unrecoverable-condition proof. In 
> fact, we had  a discussion this afternoon on the TCON about   
> introducing state machines into the applications itself. Something 
> like an application class with state machines that every application 
> should be derived from. This design will tighten it up even more.
>
> cheers,
> -Andinet

I think as we design IGSTK, we should work with the assumption that it
is never going to perfectly crash-proof.  We need to be ready for the
worst.  The titanic wasn't an unsinkable ship, regardless of what its
designers thought.

One of the most important things for medical software is to be able to
quantify its reliability.  I wonder if there is some way we can do this
for IGSTK?  Usually reliability statistics are computed at the 
application level, by looking at failure rates or counting how often 
critical bugs are found.

- David