Software Assumptions Lead to Preventable Errors

Hello, Andy Steingruebl here.  Cross-posting from my personal blog.

Here is a paper I co-wrote with Gunnar Peterson for the IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine. The title is pretty much the subject of the piece - how assumptions in the development process, and the associated lack of documentation and explicit statement of those assumptions, leads to preventable errors. We cover some techniques for documenting assumptions across a number of areas of the product lifecycle. Hopefully there are a few ideas here about formally documenting assumptions that you'll find useful.

Note: This article is Copyright IEEE and was originally published in IEEE Security &
Privacy magazine, vol. 7, no. 4, 2009, pp. 84-87.