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Assurance Provenance: The Next Challenge in Software Documentation

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Software Engineering (ISoLA 2022)

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Abstract

High-assurance software is often used in safety- and mission-critical systems where loss of functionality can lead to loss of life or property. Naturally, such systems need to be certified before use and several technologies have been developed to support such efforts. The techniques build structured assurance arguments to justify the safety and performance of the system. Most frequently, software is certified as part of a larger system where that larger system changes rather infrequently. However, this contradicts the current practice of rapid software evolution, where the need for new functionality is addressed by a software upgrade. As a consequence, assurance arguments often lag behind, leading to delays in implementing new capabilities. Hence, there is a clear need for the rapid re-analysis and re-evaluation of the assurance arguments. This paper argues that assurance arguments are a special kind of software documentation that need to be tightly integrated with the implementation, and their construction and managed evolution are critical to the safety and performance of software-integrated systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We use the term ‘high-assurance’ instead of the more conventional ‘safety-critical’ to emphasize that these systems are required to be certified by some independent authority before operational use.

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Acknowledgments

The work was supported by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under its Assured Autonomy program, and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA or AFRL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Software-Integrated Systems, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Gabor Karsai & Daniel Balasubramanian

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  1. Gabor Karsai
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  2. Daniel Balasubramanian
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Correspondence to Gabor Karsai .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, CSIS and Lero, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Karsai, G., Balasubramanian, D. (2022). Assurance Provenance: The Next Challenge in Software Documentation. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Software Engineering. ISoLA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13702. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19756-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19756-7_6

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