High assurance systems engineering

Summary form only given, as follows. As we aim to develop more and more complex software systems for real time applications, the concern about their safety and reliability is also growing. In the author's opinion, development of these systems require more formal approaches than the development of a general purpose software system. We can draw our analogy from hardware engineering for which we know that in order to develop high performance systems, we must focus on designing highly specialized hardware which has rather little reusability for any other general purpose computation. We provide some critic on various design approaches of such systems.