comments, corrections and clarifications

Software Criticality categorization
Well, what I meant by "mission critical" is that a bug in the software would result in the loss of primary mission functionality. We used several daemons written in Perl, running onboard the instrument in flight, to control data acquisition and instrument configuration.
by Dr. Zowie on Aug 26, 2010 at 15:31 UTC
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=857358
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As I found out during my FLOSS Weekly interview with the Mars Rover Drivers, a giant Perl script validates every rover command uplink, to verify that they don't attempt known bad behavior. And as they find new bad things to do, they add it to the script.
Yes, it's on the ground, but it's absolutely mission critical.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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Software Criticality categorization
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Category Definition
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A Software that if not executed, or if not correctly executed,
or whose anomalous behaviour can cause or contribute to a
system failure resulting in:
-> Catastrophic consequences
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B Software that if not executed, or if not correctly executed,
or whose anomalous behaviour can cause or contribute to a
system failure resulting in:
-> Critical consequences
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C Software that if not executed, or if not correctly executed,
or whose anomalous behaviour can cause or contribute to a
system failure resulting in:
-> Major consequences
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D Software that if not executed, or if not correctly executed,
or whose anomalous behaviour can cause or contribute to a
system failure resulting in:
-> Minor or Negligible consequences
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