Severe Software Defects Trigger Factors: A Case Study of a School Management System

In this paper, we identify the groups of triggers that are responsible for severe software failures. These failures prevent any essential operation or activity to be conducted through the concerned system or other systems connected to it. In fact, the occurrence of these failures causes a double financial cost to organizations: one in fixing them and the other one because of the unavailability of the system or systems. We targeted three types of software defects as sources of these failures. We conducted this study by classifying 665 software defects of a school management system and we found that the top two trigger groups are the technology and the IS architecture groups

MBSE, PLM, MIP and Robust Optimization for System of Systems Management, Application to SCCOA French Air Defense Program

International audienc

Measuring change in software projects through an earned value lens

18th International Conference on Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, SPICE 2018; Tessaloniki; Greece; 9 October 2018 through 10 October 2018Earned Value Management (EVM) is a common performance management tool for project management. EVM enables depicting the project progress in terms of scope, cost and schedule and provides future predictions based on trends and patterns. Even though EVM is widely used in various disciplines like manufacturing and construction, it is not common in software industry. One reason for this underutilization is the mismatch of an inherent nature of the software projects and the traditional EVM. Traditional EVM ignores change effort but it is predominant in software projects. We have developed cEVM as an extension to the traditional EVM to incorporate change and subsequent rework and evolution costs to measure earned value in software development projects more accurately. In this study, we focus on two applications of cEVM we performed to explore the usability of cEVM and to compare cEVM with traditional EVM. This paper discusses the results of the case studies as well as benefits and difficulties of cEVM

Early Verification and Validation According to ISO 26262 by Combining Fault Injection and Mutation Testing

Today software is core part of modern automobiles. The amount, complexity and importance of software components within Electrical/Electronics (E/E) systems of modern cars is only increasing with time. Several automotive functions carrying software provide or interact with safety critical systems such as systems steering and braking and thus assuring functional safety for such systems is of high importance. Requirements for the safety assurance are specified partially by such functional safety standards as ISO 26262. The standard provides the framework and guidelines for the development of hardware and software for components deemed to be safety critical. In this chapter we argue that traditional approaches for safety assurance such as fault injection and mutation testing can be adapted and applied to functional models to enable early verification and validation according to the requirements of ISO 26262. We show how to use fault injection in combination with mutation based testing to identify defects early in the development process - both theoretically and on a case of self-driving miniature vehicles. The argument is grounded upon the current best practices within the industry, a study of ISO 26262 standard, and academic and industrial case studies using fault injection and mutation based testing applied to the functional model level. In this paper we also provide the initial validation of this approach using software of a self-driving miniature vehicle

Microservice-Based Agile Architectures: An Opportunity for Specialized Niche Technologies

This work discusses lessons learned from the development of a medium-size peer-to-peer distributed software system centered around asynchronous computation and message-/stream-oriented communication. Albeit foreign to traditional high-integrity systems, these architectural characteristics are making rapid headway into large-scale mission-critical and business-critical software infrastructures, thus becoming candidate solutions for the design of reliable systems. We wanted our software architecture to be agile, that is, versatile, easy to evolve and modify, and resilient enough not to degrade across changes. To meet this goal, we adopted the microservices style, which afforded us the choice of best-of-breed technology to implement the individual system parts. Embracing heterogeneity while seeking agility, however, challenged our ability to design effective solutions for component coordination and interaction, as well as the goodness of fit of the used technologies for system integration and testing. Reflecting on our experience, we distill the lessons we learned in terms of architectural patterns, highlighting the pros and cons we saw in the microservices style and in our technologies selection

Spatio-temporal models for formal analysis and property-based testing?

This paper presents our ongoing work on spatio-temporal models for formal analysis and property-based testing. Our proposed framework aims at reducing the impedence mismatch between formal methods and practicioners. We introduce a set of formal methods and explain their interplay and benefits in terms of usability