[IGSTK-Developers] Crash recovery?

[Tina Kapur]

Speaking of reliability and testing, is testing of applications considered
outside the currently defined scope of the toolkit?  I am sure that those of
you who have worked with FDA requirements on products have suffered through
the mechanism of writing one or more tests corresponding to each requirement
in the req spec, and then documenting that you ran the test and it passed.
Other measures of robustness that I've also found useful are stress testing
in which we simulate multiple passes through the software (this which
basically checks for memory leaks and re-entrant code).  Again, as we all
know, testing applications is a pretty large task and I don't want to use
too many of the group's cycles on it if it is currently outside the scope of
the project...

-Tina

 
>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Gobbi [mailto:dgobbi at atamai.com] 
>Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 5:31 PM
>To: Andinet Enquobahrie
>Cc: Tina Kapur; 'IGSTK Developers'
>Subject: Re: [IGSTK-Developers] Crash recovery?
>
>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
>
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