Matching Items (3)
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A domain-specific approach to verification & validation of software requirements

Description
Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other…

Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other steps. In order to produce better quality software, the requirements have to be free of any defects. Verification and Validation (V&V;) of requirements are performed to improve their quality, by performing the V&V; process on the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document. V&V; of the software requirements focused to a specific domain helps in improving quality. A large database of software requirements from software projects of different domains is created. Software requirements from commercial applications are focus of this project; other domains embedded, mobile, E-commerce, etc. can be the focus of future efforts. The V&V; is done to inspect the requirements and improve the quality. Inspections are done to detect defects in the requirements and three approaches for inspection of software requirements are discussed; ad-hoc techniques, checklists, and scenario-based techniques. A more systematic domain-specific technique is presented for performing V&V; of requirements.
ContributorsChughtai, Rehman (Author) / Ghazarian, Arbi (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Millard, Bruce (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Formal Requirements Toolkit for Testing and Monitoring Temporal Logic-based Specifications

Description
Testing and verification is an essential procedure to assert a system adheres to some notion of safety. To validate such assertions, monitoring has provided an effective solution to verifying the conformance of complex systems against a set of properties describing what constitutes safe behavior. In authoring such properties, Temporal Logic…

Testing and verification is an essential procedure to assert a system adheres to some notion of safety. To validate such assertions, monitoring has provided an effective solution to verifying the conformance of complex systems against a set of properties describing what constitutes safe behavior. In authoring such properties, Temporal Logic (TL) has become a widely adopted specification language in many monitoring applications because of its ability to formally capture time-critical behaviors of reactive systems. This broad acceptance into the verification community and others, however, has naturally led to a lack of TL-based requirement elicitation standards as well as increased friction in tool interoperability. In this thesis, I propose a standardization of TL-based requirement languages through the development of a Formal Requirements Toolkit (FoRek): a modular, extensible, and maintainable collection of TL parsers, translators, and interfaces. To this end, six propositional TL languages are supported in addition to their appropriate past-time variants to provide a framework for a variety of applications using TL as a specification language. Furthermore, improvements to the Pythonic Formal Requirements Language (PyFoReL) tool are performed in addition to a formal definition on the structure of a PyFoReL program. And lastly, to demonstrate the results of this work, FoRek is integrated into an offline monitor to showcase its intended use and potential applications into other domains.
ContributorsAnderson, Jacob W (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios GF (Thesis advisor) / Pedrielli, Giulia GP (Thesis advisor) / Xu, Zhe ZX (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023

My Kingdom for a Toolsmith! The IRIDIUM System Specification Through the Lens of Actor-Network Theory

Description

Most would agree that telecommunications systems are socially constructed. Since communication tends to involve people, it seems obvious that people should impact the creation of such systems. But it is far less obvious that the specifications for such systems should be noted for their social construction. As marvelous and technical as…

Most would agree that telecommunications systems are socially constructed. Since communication tends to involve people, it seems obvious that people should impact the creation of such systems. But it is far less obvious that the specifications for such systems should be noted for their social construction. As marvelous and technical as the system is, we must not forget the important technological artifact known as the specification that came before it. This paper tells the story of the social construction of the IRIDIUM system specification as viewed through the eyes of a popular socio-technical systems (STS) analysis tool. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is employed to elucidate the culture of the Motorola requirements engineering process while describing some of the primary actors and their lively interactions as they strove diligently to produce the “perfect” specification. Throughout, it will become obvious that just as the kingdom was lost “for want of a nail,” so the IRIDIUM system specification was nearly lost for want of a toolsmith.
ContributorsRoberts, Thomas Wade (Author) / Arizona State University. School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment (Contributor) / Arizona State University. Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management (Contributor)