Assessment of High Integrity Software Components for Completeness, Consistency, Fault-Tolerance, and Reliability

The use of formal model based (FMB) methods to evaluate the quality of components is an important research area. Except for a growing number of exceptions, FMB methods are still not really used in practice. This chapter presents two case studies that illustrate the value of FMB approaches for developing and evaluating component-based software. In the first study, Zed (or Z) and Statecharts are used to evaluate (a priori) the software requirement specification of a Guidance Control System for completeness, consistency and fault-tolerance. The second study evaluates (post-priori) the reliability of a complex vehicle system using Stochastic Activity Networks (SANs). The FMB approach presented here provides further evidence that such methods can indeed be useful by showing how these two different industrial strength systems were assessed and the results. Clearly, future investigations of this nature will help to convince software system developers using component based approaches that such FMB methods should be considered as a valuable tool toward improving the software product lifecycle (quality, schedule and cost).

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