Abstract
A thought experiment on evolution of assurance argument is performed on the basis of an interview with a manufacturer that applied for a certification of conformance of their in-house software life cycle to a safety standard. The working hypothesis of the experiment is that assurance cases help find problems in arguments on software life cycle and improve the life cycle. Based on the result of the thought experiment, questions for further empirical studies are generated and the ontology of relevant information items are analysed.
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Notes
- 1.
Here is a more strict but involved explanation. Items and the top level requirements are described in a different language as they are at different level of abstraction. So, fulfillment by an item of the top level requirements means fulfillment by an item of the interpreted top level requirements, given an interpretation of top level requirements language to items language. There are in general many such interpretations, such as the manufacturer’s and certification body’s in our thought experiment. Stakeholders would have their own interpretation under which they are confident that “an item fulfills the requirements” means “an item fulfills the interpreted requirements.”
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge Makoto Takeyama’s thoughtful comments on the draft of this paper. Koji Okuno coordinated the authors’ contact with Nihon Koden Corp. that led to this work. The authors thank Kazuo Oosone, Masato Tanaka and Yuichi Kurabe for sharing their experience as software engineering experts in industry. The second author is grateful to Bengt Nordström for providing necessary facilities to prepare a draft of this paper during his stay in Göteborg.
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Kinoshita, S., Kinoshita, Y. (2017). A Thought Experiment on Evolution of Assurance Cases. In: Tonetta, S., Schoitsch, E., Bitsch, F. (eds) Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security . SAFECOMP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10489. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66284-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66284-8_2
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