Abstract
[Context and motivation] Safety-critical systems in application domains such as aerospace, automotive, healthcare, and railway are subject to assurance processes to provide confidence that the systems do not pose undue risks to people, property, or the environment. The development of safety cases is usually part of these processes to justify that a system satisfies its safety requirements and thus is dependable. [Question/problem] Although safety cases have been used in industry for over two decades, their management still requires improvement. Important weaknesses have been identified and means to assess the quality of safety cases are limited. [Principal ideas/results] This paper presents a research preview on the assessment of the quality of safety cases. We explain how the area should develop and present our preliminary work towards enabling the assessment with Verification Studio, an industrial tool for system artefact quality analysis. [Contribution] The insights provided allow researchers and practitioners to gain an understanding of why safety case quality requires further investigation, what aspects must be considered, and how quality assessment could be performed in practice.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to this paper has received funding from the AMASS project (H2020-ECSEL ID 692474; Spain’s MINECO ref. PCIN-2015-262). We also thank REFSQ reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the paper.
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de la Vara, J.L., Jiménez, G., Mendieta, R., Parra, E. (2019). Assessment of the Quality of Safety Cases: A Research Preview. In: Knauss, E., Goedicke, M. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11412. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15538-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15538-4_9
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