Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Related Work
Most earlier research on helping development teams to achieve specific product
qualities has focused on techniques and guidelines for specific quality attributes
(e.g. [8,9,10,11,12]) or specific lifecycle phases (e.g. [13]). It is important to ad-
dress quality throughout the entire development process. Process engineers select
appropriate techniques and incorporate them into development processes created
or tailored for new projects. The selection and integration of techniques into de-
fined process models requires relevant information about those techniques to be
available and presented to process engineers.
There are some efforts in the safety area to describe information about safety
techniques. The EWICS TC7 Software Sub-group [14] and Leveson [15, p.313-
358] provide general descriptions of safety techniques and highlight advantages
and disadvantages of using each technique. Characteristics related to process in-
formation have been discussed by Alberico et al. [11]) and Stephans [16]. Zurich
Risk Engineering [17] has compared hazard analysis techniques from the resource
perspective (team approach, documentation, time required and team leader ex-
pertise) and the scope perspective (result, analysis approach, depth of analysis,
emphasize single or multiple failures). These (especially the resource perspective)
are closely related to project characteristics. Some approaches in software per-
formance engineering (SPE) such as [18,19] discuss integration of performance
activities into the software development process. Vegas [20] has proposed a char-
acterisation schema to identify the relevant information for testing techniques.
Previous approaches do not attempt to systematically capture and document
the important information about QATs and their relationship with other pro-
cess elements. Most of the safety guidelines and approaches still lack information
which is important for QAT integration and process tailoring. Some attributes
identified in [20] and [14] are only suitable for testing techniques and are not
relevant to other types of QATs. Development teams need appropriate informa-
tion to understand the characteristics of QATs, how they are incorporated into
process models, and how they function to identify, analyse or control potential
quality problems.
QATs for safety-critical system have been selected to motivate this initial
framework because the area of system safety is well-established. There are many
existing procedures, handbooks, standards, books and other references. In safety-
critical systems, techniques are available to perform hazard evaluation, hazard
control and hazard analysis. This does not affect the validity of the whole frame-
work as all extracted characteristics are non-safety specific.
3QATF
The ultimate goal of this research is to improve product quality by better in-
tegrating appropriate QATs into software process models. Information about
QATs can support decision making during QAT selection and integration with
development processes. The QAT framework (QATF) captures and presents in-
formation about QATs in a format intended to be suitable for process engineers
