by Christoph Mayr-Dorn, Michael Vierhauser, Stefan Bichler, Felix Keplinger, Jane Cleland-Huang, Alexander Egyed, Thomas Mehofer
Abstract:
When dealing with safety–critical systems, various regulations, standards, and guidelines stipulate stringent requirements for certification and traceability of artifacts, but typically lack details with regards to the corresponding software engineering process. Given the industrial practice of only using semi-formal notations for describing engineering processes – with the lack of proper tool mapping – engineers and developers need to invest a significant amount of time and effort to ensure that all steps mandated by quality assurance are followed. The sheer size and complexity of systems and regulations make manual, timely feedback from Quality Assurance (QA) engineers infeasible. In order to address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for tracking, and “passively” executing processes in the background, automatically checking QA constraints depending on process progress, and informing the developer of unfulfilled QA constraints. We evaluate our approach by applying it to three case studies: a safety–critical open-source community system, a safety–critical system in the air-traffic control domain, and a non-safety–critical, web-based system. Results from our analysis confirm that trace links are often corrected or completed after the work step has been considered finished, and the engineer has already moved on to another step. Thus, support for timely and automated constraint checking has significant potential to reduce rework as the engineer receives continuous feedback already during their work step.
Reference:
ProCon: An automated process-centric quality constraints checking framework (Christoph Mayr-Dorn, Michael Vierhauser, Stefan Bichler, Felix Keplinger, Jane Cleland-Huang, Alexander Egyed, Thomas Mehofer), In Journal of Systems and Software, volume 202, 2023.
Bibtex Entry:
@Article{MayrDorn2023,
author = {Christoph Mayr-Dorn and Michael Vierhauser and Stefan Bichler and Felix Keplinger and Jane Cleland-Huang and Alexander Egyed and Thomas Mehofer},
journal = {Journal of Systems and Software},
title = {ProCon: An automated process-centric quality constraints checking framework},
year = {2023},
issn = {0164-1212},
pages = {111727},
volume = {202},
abstract = {When dealing with safety–critical systems, various regulations, standards, and guidelines stipulate stringent requirements for certification and traceability of artifacts, but typically lack details with regards to the corresponding software engineering process. Given the industrial practice of only using semi-formal notations for describing engineering processes – with the lack of proper tool mapping – engineers and developers need to invest a significant amount of time and effort to ensure that all steps mandated by quality assurance are followed. The sheer size and complexity of systems and regulations make manual, timely feedback from Quality Assurance (QA) engineers infeasible. In order to address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for tracking, and “passively” executing processes in the background, automatically checking QA constraints depending on process progress, and informing the developer of unfulfilled QA constraints. We evaluate our approach by applying it to three case studies: a safety–critical open-source community system, a safety–critical system in the air-traffic control domain, and a non-safety–critical, web-based system. Results from our analysis confirm that trace links are often corrected or completed after the work step has been considered finished, and the engineer has already moved on to another step. Thus, support for timely and automated constraint checking has significant potential to reduce rework as the engineer receives continuous feedback already during their work step.},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111727},
keywords = {LIT Secure and Correct Systems Lab, FWF P31989, FWF P29415, FWF P34805, Pro2Future, LIT},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016412122300122X},
}