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Standards Library — Software Reliability & Software FMEA Indexed 11 Documents Groups 4 Reference Index
STD
Reference Index · Software Reliability & Software FMEA

Software Reliability & Software FMEA Standards

Eleven standards, handbooks, and guidance documents touch on software reliability and software FMEA — and most of them weren't written with software as the primary subject. This index summarizes what each one actually says about software, and where it fits relative to the others.

1Reliability

Software Reliability Engineering

One standard sits at the center of this index — not a safety or quality standard with a software section bolted on, but a standard written specifically to cover software reliability across the full life cycle.

IEEE 1633
Recommended Practice on Software Reliability · Scope: 10 Practices
A life-cycle framework for software reliability — from spotting risks before a line of code exists, through predicting, forecasting, and measuring reliability, to producing assessments a program can actually act on.
Illustrative Summary
2FMEA

Software FMEA & FMECA Standards

Six standards touch on FMEA applied to software, ranging from a dedicated software FMEA clause to hardware-first FMEA standards where software has to earn its place as one qualitative technique among several.

SAE 1025 — Section 7
Software Failure Modes & Effects Analysis · Issued Jan 2026
Breaks from classical hardware FMEA logic — software doesn't wear out, drift, or fatigue, so Section 7 defines its own failure taxonomy, risk scoring, and occurrence estimation, based on the 6D CDE software-centric SwFMEA approach.
Illustrative Summary
SAE ARP5580
FMEA Practices for Non-Automobile Applications · Issued 2001, Reaffirmed 2020
Reaffirmed without updating its 2001 software content — still frames software around hardware-derived units, and its detailed FMEA is expensive while still missing most of what actually breaks.
Dated Approach
AIAG-VDA FMEA Handbook
1st Edition · Published June 2019
Written for hardware — Design FMEA, Process FMEA, FMEA-MSR — with no software chapter of its own. Shows how the 7-Step Approach can be carried into software step by step.
Practitioner Extension
IEC 61508 — Part 3
Functional Safety of E/E/PE Systems · Edition 2, 2010
Treats FMEA as native to hardware, where Part 2 uses it to quantify random failure rates. Software has no failure rate to quantify, so software FMEA earns its place as one of several qualitative techniques for systematic failure control.
Public — via IEC
IEC 61508-7
Overview of Techniques and Measures · Edition 2, 2010
The technique library behind the rest of 61508. FMEA shows up exactly once, filed under systematic-failure validation for hardware and software alike, not under a software-specific annex.
Public — via IEC
ISO 26262 — Part 6
Road Vehicles: Functional Safety · Edition 2, 2018
Doesn't mandate FMEA by name — calls for "inductive and/or deductive" safety analyses scaled to risk instead. Traces where a software FMEA actually plugs into the standard's 12-part structure.
Public — via ISO
3NASA

NASA Software Safety Standards

Two related NASA standards — one superseding the other — define software safety requirements without necessarily naming software FMEA outright, instead describing the outcomes and lifecycle roles it's expected to fill.

NASA-STD-8739.8A
Software Assurance & Software Safety Standard · Rev A, 2020
Absorbed NASA-STD-8719.13 in 2020 and rewrote software safety as performance-based requirements. Doesn't name software FMEA the way its predecessor did — it names the outcomes a software FMEA is one good way to produce.
Public — via NASA
NASA-STD-8719.13
NASA Software Safety Standard · Rev C, 2013
Defines who does what, and when. Its companion Guidebook supplies the how-to, giving software FMEA a specific, repeated job across two lifecycle phases, paired with Fault Tree Analysis as its top-down counterpart.
Public — via NASA
4Design Reqs

Generic Software Safety Design Requirements

Two closely related catalogs of baseline software safety design requirements — one the direct ancestor of the other — spell out requirements to design into safety-critical software rather than a failure-analysis method to apply after the fact.

NATO AOP-52
Section 4 — Generic SW Safety Design Reqs · Edition B, Nov 2016 (orig. 2009)
NATO's own catalog of baseline software safety design requirements, and the direct ancestor of JSSSEH Appendix E. The two share most of the same requirement statements under different section numbers and wording.
Public — STANAG 4452
JSSSEH — Appendix E
Joint Software Systems Safety Engineering Handbook · Version 1.0, Aug 2010
A catalog of baseline requirements for safety-critical software spanning process controls, system and interface design, power-up behavior, self-checks, coding rules, maintenance, and test — organized into thirteen subsections, E.1 through E.13.
Public — Distribution A