Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
MS Thesis Presentation
Architecture-Driven Fault-Based Testing for Software Safety
Havva Gülay Gürbüz
MS Student
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University
Currently, an increasing number of systems are controlled by software and rely on the correct operation of software. In this context, a safety-critical system is defined as a system in which the malfunctioning of software could result in death, injury or damage to environment. To mitigate these serious risks the architecture of safety-critical systems need to be carefully designed and analyzed.
A common practice for modeling software architecture is the adoption of architectural perspectives and software architecture viewpoint approaches. Architectural perspectives include a collection of activities, tactics and guidelines that require consideration across a number of the architectural viewpoint approach which aims to model the architecture for particular stakeholders and concerns. Existing approaches tend to be general purpose and do not explicitly focus on safety concern in particular. To provide a complementary and dedicated support for designing safety critical systems we propose safety perspective and an architecture framework approach for software safety.
Once the safety critical systems are designed it is important to analyze these for fitness before implementation, installation and operation. Hereby, it is important to ensure that the potential faults can be identified and cost-effective solutions are provided to avoid or recover from the failures. In this context, one of the most important issues is to investigate the effectiveness of the applied safety tactics to safety-critical systems.
Several scenario-based software architecture analysis approaches exist that aim to analyze the quality of the architecture. Unfortunately, these approaches do not directly consider safety concern and tend to be general purpose for in-depth analysis of the safety tactics. We propose a fault-based testing approach for analyzing the effectiveness of safety tactics. Fault-based testing is one of the testing approaches which aim to analyze, evaluate and design test suites by using fault knowledge. The approach results in the impact analysis of a test suite on the applied tactics and likewise provides an important insight in the effectiveness of the safety tactics. Both the design and the fault-based testing approach have been applied for an industrial case of Aselsan.
DATE: 20 August, 2014, Wednesday @ 09:30
PLACE: EA-409