NuSEE: Nuclear Software Engineering Environment

Abstract

The concept of software V&V throughout the software development lifecycle has been accepted as a means to assure the quality of safety-critical systems for more than a decade [1]. The Integrated Environment (IE) approach is introduced as one of the countermeasures for V&V (Chapter 5). Adequate tools are accompanied by V&V techniques for the convenience and efficiency of V&V processes. This chapter introduces NuSEE (Nuclear Software Engineering Environment), which is a toolset to support the IE approach developed at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) [2]. The software lifecycle consists of concept, requirements, design, implementation, and test phases. Each phase is clearly defined to separate the activities to be conducted within it. Minimum V&V tasks for safety-critical systems are defined for each phase in IEEE Standard 1012 for “Software Verification and Validation” (Figure 6.1) [3]. V&V tasks are traceable back to the software requirements. A critical software product should be understandable for independent evaluation and testing. The products of all lifecycle phases are also evaluated for software quality attributes, such as correctness, completeness, consistency, and traceability. Therefore, it is critical to define an effective specification method for each software development phase and V&V task based on the effective specifications during the whole software lifecycle.