P. Avgeriou and U. Zdun (Eds.): ECSA 2014, LNCS 8627, pp. 365–373, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 Safety Perspective for Supporting Architectural Design of Safety-Critical Systems Havva Gülay Gürbüz, Bedir Tekinerdogan, and Nagehan Pala Er Department of Computer Engineering, Bilkent University, Ankara 06800, Turkey havva.gurbuz@bilkent.edu.tr, {bedir,nagehan}@cs.bilkent.edu.tr Abstract. Various software architecture viewpoint approaches have been intro- duced to model the architecture views for stakeholder concerns. To address quality concerns in software architecture views, an important approach is to de- fine architectural perspectives that include a collection of activities, tactics and guidelines that require consideration across a number of the architectural views. Several architectural perspectives have been defined for selected quality con- cerns. In this paper we propose the Safety Perspective that is dedicated to en- sure that the safety concern is properly addressed in the architecture views. The proposed safety perspective can assist the system and software architects in de- signing, analyzing and communicating the decisions regarding safety concerns. We illustrate the safety perspective for a real industrial case study and discuss the lessons learned. Keywords: Software architecture design, software architecture modeling, soft- ware architecture analysis, safety-critical systems. 1 Introduction To address quality concerns in software architecture views, an important approach is to define architectural perspectives that include a collection of activities, tactics and guidelines that require consideration across a number of the architectural views [6]. In this context, Rozanski and Wood define several architectural perspectives for selected quality concerns such as security, performance, scalability, availability and evolution. In order to capture the system-wide quality concerns, each relevant perspective is applied to some or all views. In this way, the architectural views provide the descrip- tion of the architecture, while the architectural perspectives can help to analyze and modify the architecture to ensure that system exhibits the desired quality properties. An important concern for designing safety-critical systems is safety since a failure or malfunction may result in death or serious injury to people, or loss or severe dam- age to equipment or environmental harm. It is generally agreed that quality concerns need to be evaluated early on in the life cycle before the implementation to mitigate risks. For safety-critical systems this seems to be an even more serious requirement due to the dramatic consequences of potential failures. For coping with safety several standard and implementation approaches have been defined but this has not been directly considered at the architecture modeling level. Hence, we propose the Safety