ERCIM News No.40 - January 2000  Software Certification: Myths
and Reality  by Fabrizio Fabbrini, Mario Fusani, Vinicio Lami
Certification is treacherous stuff. People tend to have
contradictory attitudes. Some want to have a full guaranty that
a given product or service is reliable, others consider the term
and all that it concerns as deceptive and used only for
marketing purposes. And when it comes to software, professionals
may be found near to hysteria, insisting that the concept should
be excluded from the technological, if not the commercial,
realm. Despite all this, practitioners, scientists, and even
users, can coexist happily with software certification, if only
they take a positive view of the concepts, actions and entities
involved. The problem is that many people talk and assert their
opinions on certification without really knowing what it’s all
about. Our aim here is to define the area of interest and show
that nothing dramatic happens when software is involved.
Certification can be described