Human Reliability and Software Development

Human Reliability has been an important term within high-risk industries. Theinterest has emerged within software development to reduce human errors andtheir negative impact on software engineering. Human errors cost the softwareindustry an enormous amount of time and money every year.SHERPA is a Human Reliability method made to suit several domains. However, theproject report suggests that a few changes are necessary to suit software development. Toevaluate SHERPA two phases of research was conducted, a focus group session andan experiment. The focus group session was conducted prior to the experiment.The focus group had two agendas, firstly to conduct a hierarchical taskanalysis, the first step of SHERPA, and secondly to discuss important aspects ofa programming behavioral model. The findings from the focus group session wereused to make adjustment to SHERPA before the experiment.The purpose of the experiment was to test SHERPA on a set of predefined tasks,and to investigate the adjustments made to SHERPA prior to the experiment. Thefindings from the experiment were discussed and used to evaluate SHERPA as wellas the adjustments. A new version of SHERPA, more suitable for softwaredevelopment, is presented in this master thesis.After conducting two phases of research and data collection, it can beconcluded, based on the results from this study, that SHERPA is a useful tool inexploring human errors in software development