Software Safety Testing based on STPA

Abstract Software safety testing is important to critical software in Avionics; however, the safety test requirements are usually not clear during system-level testing. Considering software safety engineering and software test theory, this paper researches software safety testing based on STPA. It proposes a software safety test framework which includes 4 phases: software safety test planning, software safety test design, software safety test implementation and software safety test assessment; then to obtain software safety test requirements in safety testing, it introduces a method of software safety test requirements elicitation based on STPA, and an example is given to explain how to put it into use.