Software Reliability — Hermann Kopetz, 1980 | Early Software Engineering & Fault-Tolerant Computing

Published at the beginning of the 1980s, Software Reliability is an early systematic treatment of a problem that had become impossible for the computing industry to ignore: how to design software that continues to behave predictably when programs, hardware, or human assumptions fail.

Hermann Kopetz approaches reliability from both theoretical and practical directions, covering software errors, program structure, functional specification, verification, debugging, automatic error detection and correction, maintenance, and the management of reliable software. Springer describes the book as an attempt to bridge theory and practice, particularly in areas such as testing and error handling that were often handled ad hoc in early software development.

The pictured section on reliability and system design discusses synchronization, parallel processes, shared resources, critical sections, and mutual exclusion—problems that remain fundamental to operating systems and concurrent software today.

The book is also notable for its author. Kopetz became a major figure in dependable real-time and embedded computing, later serving as professor of software engineering and real-time systems at TU Wien. His work includes the development of time-triggered architectures for safety-critical systems, and he became an IEEE Fellow for contributions to fault-tolerant real-time computing.

This edition is the revised English-language version of Kopetz's German Software-Zuverlässigkeit, originally published in 1976. The English edition first appeared through Macmillan in 1979; this copy is the 1980 Springer-Verlag New York issue, ISBN 0-387-91169-3.

Bibliographic details:

• Hermann Kopetz
• Software Reliability
• Springer-Verlag New York
• 1980
• First edition / revised English-language edition
• 118 pages
• ISBN 0-387-91169-3
• Early software engineering, reliability, fault tolerance, debugging, concurrency

Condition:
Vintage former library copy in fair-to-good used condition. Gray cover shows noticeable age-related edge wear. Library label remains on the front cover, with handwritten classification notation inside. Interior pages show light age toning and scattered spotting but remain intact and highly readable. See photographs for exact condition.