Towards Trustable Software

One Tree Less founder Peter Domican is one of the co-authors of a new white paper entitled 'Towards Trustable Software – A Systematic Approach To Establishing Trust In Software' released by The Institute for Strategy, Resilience & Security (ISRS) at University College London (UCL) in association with software developer Codethink Ltd.

While software has become critical to virtually all aspects of modern life, processes for determining whether we can trust it are conspicuously absent. Towards Trustable Software explores the potential for a more secure foundation for societal resilience, analogous to existing trust mechanisms in key industries such as finance, healthcare and construction.

The paper proposes the concept of a trustable software engineering process as a necessary and appropriate underpinning platform to ensure solid foundations for the trust of software going forward.

The principles of how that process might work are outlined, by establishing software engineering practices that generate audit information at all stages of creation, deployment, change and use, to enable the continual assessment of trust, analogous to existing mechanisms in key industries such as finance, healthcare and construction.

Digital resilience is becoming synonymous with resilience for most businesses and our inability to trust software should be of serious concern to any company. Organisations are embedding software in their core business processes with no real idea of where the code has come from or how it has been tested.