When dealing with safety-critical systems, various regulations, standards, and guidelines stipulate stringent requirements for certification and traceability of artifacts, but typically lack \rev{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.
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This content will become publicly available on September 1, 2024
Accountable Design for Individual, Societal, and Regulated Values in the UAV Domain
Software systems are increasingly expected to address a broad range of stakeholder values representing both personal and societal values as well as values ensconced as laws and regulations. Whereas laws and regulations must be fully addressed, other human values need to be carefully analyzed and prioritized within the context of candidate architectural designs. The majority of prior work has investigated requirements engineering techniques for either regulatory compliance or for human-values, we take an integrated approach which simultaneously considers laws and regulations as well as societal and personal human values throughout the system analysis, specification, and design process. We illustrate our approach through detailed examples drawn from a multi-drone system regulated by the USA Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and operating in a domain rich with human and societal values. We then discuss requirements engineering challenges and solutions unique to identifying analyzing, and prioritizing human, societal, and regulatory requirements, and ultimately for designing accountable software systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2131515
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10471798
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 31st {IEEE} International Requirements Engineering Conference, {RE} 2023, Hannover, Germany, September 4-8, 2023
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 287 to 292
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["human values","traceability","regulations","design decisions","accountable design"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Hannover, Germany
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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