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Requirement and Test Traceability – Any added value?

Requirement and Test Traceability: Think about the following situation: You are near the end of your safety-related project and you have established traceability between all the project artifacts.
In an audit (e.g. Internal Quality Assurance, Customer, External Authority) you have to demonstrate which software requirements are developed from which System Requirements. Each software requirement is linked to one or more system requirements and also any system requirement is linked to one or more software or hardware requirements. Read more

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Requirement Engineering – Aspects which even not considerd in theory!

Requirement Engineering theory: In most of the requirement engineering publications, the focus is on management aspects. The collection and management of requirements is discussed extensively. In the following blog I discuss important aspects which are not sufficiently considered in the RE theory. I start with the definition of Requirement Engineering in the book “Requirements Engineering Fundamentals” (Klaus Pohl, Chris Rupp). Read more

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Challenges when determining the structural source code coverage on the target!

Structural Coverage Target: The proof of a 100% structural source code coverage is required by almost all functional safety standards (IEC61508, ISO26262, DO 178C, etc.). In the individual SIL / ASIL levels, only the type of source code coverage is differentiated. Essentially, the Statement Coverage (low SIL / ASIL Level), the Branch Coverage and the MC / DC Coverage (high SIL / ASIL Level) are required. For good reasons, however, e.g. no path coverage required. These would mean that you would check all the combinations of paths that are possible in a software. This would be an extremely high multiple of test cases compared to MC / DC coverage. Read more

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Good safety development process – What is it?

IEC 61508, ISO26262, DO 178C, ISO 25119: Have you ever encountered these abbreviations in your professional life? If so, there is a high probability that you are already implementing functional safety projects in your company or that you are entering the market in the near future. Perhaps you have already made the experience, or at least, heard of the fact that especially software projects in the field of functional safety can only be carried out with very high documentation / test effort. The safety development process requires this effort. In addition, such projects are very rigid, inefficient, and inflexible. Is such an argument or experience known to you? Read more

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Implicit Testing – A good idea (Part 1)?

In larger safety-critical projects, quite often I hear the following statement: “Well, the Requirement A is indirectly or implicitly proven with the test XY!” Do you know this sentence as well? Have you ever experienced what can happen in late project phases when you have tested many requirements indirectly?
The blog defines the term in part 1 and it discusses the causes of implicit testing. Read more

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User Stories – The better Requirements?

The book “User Stories” from Mike Cohn (ISBN 978-0321205681) has inspired me to think about the relationship between user stories and requirements. In software development, agile methods are often preferred in recent years. The classic approaches, especially the waterfall model and the V-model, seem to be more and more outdated.
As a result, user stories are preferred more and more. Do user stories really help to deliver better software quality? Read more

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Requirement/Code Reviews – The better TDD?

If a project getting difficulties with writing requirements, there is Test Driven Development (TDD) often referred to as the solution. Is that really the solution? If so, why TDD has not really become widely accepted in the software development up to now? In this blog I will express my thoughts about this topic. Read more

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Economical considerations on requirement reviews!

Quality costs money! Many can probably agree with this statement. Anyway, it is difficult to refute the statement, as it is very generic.
At the same time very often the simplistic conclusion is drawn, that any quality measure within the software development process is just expensive.
I want to take a closer look with the following blog. As an example for quality measures I will take the requirement review. These reviews are required by all the functional safety standards. Read more

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How many level of Software requirements are necessary and useful?

In my daily projects in the automotive and industrial automation industry I’m continually confronted with the following question: How many levels of software requirements have to be written? That’s an interesting question, especially if we take the aerospace industry also into account. Software requirement level are a key topic if you want to improve your requirement engineering process. Therefore, I want to highlight in this blog post this topic a bit closer. I will compare the specifications of functional safety standards IEC 61508, ISO 26262 and DO-178B / C. In the final conclusion I will provide project best practices based on my more than 15 years of experience.

In my view, a good software specification is divided into two major parts: architecture / design and textual requirements.
The architecture describes, most predominantly in graphical form, the structure and design of the software. In particular, the data and control flows are shown. The focus of textual requirements is on the description of the functionality, and the time demands on the system.
The initial question of this blog refers to the number of levels of textual requirements. Not included is the level of system requirements, which must always be present. Read more

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Are you still writing documents or are you already specifying?

You want to start a new project, the product to be developed is already set in broad terms. You decide that now is the right time to structure these rough ideas, functions and solutions and to write it down. This point in time and the questions that arise now are subsequently examined in more detail. Typical questions and thoughts that you might think about:

  • Are requirements nowadays recorded in writing?
  • Do textual Requirements imply heavy processes and thousands of pages of documents that anyway nobody reads or understands?
  • A picture tells you more than 1000 words!

Read more

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