Architectural level risk assessment

Many companies develop and maintain large-scale software systems for public and financial institutions. Should a failure occur in one of these systems, the impact would be enormous. It is therefore essential, in maintaining a system\u27s quality, to identify any defects early on in the development process in order to prevent the occurrence of failures. However, testing all modules of these systems to identify defects can be very expensive. There is therefore a need for methodologies and tools that support software engineers in identifying the defected and complex software components early on in the development process.;Risk assessment is an essential process for ensuring high quality software products. By performing risk assessment during the early software development phases we can identify complex modules, thus enables us to enhance resource allocation decisions.;To assess the risk of software systems early on in the software\u27s life cycle, we propose an architectural level risk assessment methodology. It uses UML specifications of software systems which are available early on in the software life cycle. It combines the probability of software failures and the severity associated with these failures to estimate software risk factors of software architectural elements (components/connectors), the scenarios, the use cases and systems. As a result, remedial actions to control and improve the quality of the software product can be taken.;We build a risk assessment model which will enable us to identify complex and noncomplex software components. We will be able to estimate programming and service effort, and estimate testing effort. This model will enable us also to identify components with high risk factor which would require the development of effective fault tolerant mechanisms.;To estimate the probability of software failure we introduced and developed a set of dynamic metrics which are used to measure dynamic of software architectural elements from UML static models.;To estimate severity of software failure we propose UML based severity methodology. Also we propose a validation process for both risk and severity methodologies. Finally we propose prototype tool support for the automation of the risk assessment methodology

An Efficient Method for Automatic Generation of Linearly Independent Paths in White-box Testing

Testing is the one of most significant quality assurance measures for software. It has been shown that the software testing is one of the most critical and important phases in the life cycle of software engineering. In general, software testing takes around 40-60% of the effort, time and cost. Structure-oriented test methods define test cases on the basis of the internal program structures and are widely used. Path-based test is one of the important Structure-oriented test methods during software development. However, there is still lack of automatic and highly efficient tool for generating basic paths in white-box testing. In view of this, an automatic and efficient method for generating basic paths is proposed in this paper. This method firstly transforms the source-code program into corresponding control flow graph (CFG). By modifying the original CFG to a strongly connected graph, a new algorithm (ABPC) is designed to automatically construct all basic paths. The ABPC algorithm has computational complexity linear to the number of total edges and nodes in the CFG. Through performance evaluation of many examples, it is shown that the proposed method is correct and scalable to very large test cases. The proposed method can be applied to basis path testing easily

Modeling the object-oriented software process: OPEN and the unified process

A short introduction to software process modeling is presented, particularly object-oriented modeling. Two major industrial process models are discussed: the OPEN model and the Unified Process model. In more detail, the quality assurance in the Unified Process tool (formally called Objectory) is reviewed

A Model-Driven Approach for Business Process Management

The Business Process Management is a common mechanism recommended by a high number of standards for the management of companies and organizations. In software companies this practice is every day more accepted and companies have to assume it, if they want to be competitive. However, the effective definition of these processes and mainly their maintenance and execution are not always easy tasks. This paper presents an approach based on the Model-Driven paradigm for Business Process Management in software companies. This solution offers a suitable mechanism that was implemented successfully in different companies with a tool case named NDTQ-Framework.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2010-20057-C03-02Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

Safety Engineering with COTS components

Safety-critical systems are becoming more widespread, complex and reliant on software. Increasingly they are engineered through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to alleviate the spiralling costs and development time, often in the context of complex supply chains. A parallel increased concern for safety has resulted in a variety of safety standards, with a growing consensus that a safety life cycle is needed which is fully integrated with the design and development life cycle, to ensure that safety has appropriate influence on the design decisions as system development progresses. In this article we explore the application of an integrated approach to safety engineering in which assurance drives the engineering process. The paper re- ports on the outcome of a case study on a live industrial project with a view to evaluate: its suitability for application in a real-world safety engineering setting; its benefits and limitations in counteracting some of the difficulties of safety en- gineering with COTS components across supply chains; and, its effectiveness in generating evidence which can contribute directly to the construction of safety cases

Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS - a collection of Technical Notes Part 1

This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs