A Software Certification Consortium and its Top 9 Hurdles

In August of 2007 and December of 2007, North American academic researchers, industry representatives and regulators were invited to meetings in Washington and Minneapolis, respectively, with the goal of forming a Software Certification Consortium (SCC). At the first meeting, objectives were established for the consortium and a certification grand challenge was issued. At the second meeting, all participants were asked to complete the statement: ''Software certification is hard because ...''. The group then synthesized the results into a ''Top 9'' list by means of discussion and voting. In this article, we describe the goals that we believe should be the goals of SCC, via details of these Top 9 hurdles that are preventing us from making software certification part of the mainstream.