Identifying Safety-Critical Requirement Defects Using a Tool-Based, Iterative Process
Hongyu Sun and Robyn Lutz
The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (Student Program Papers ISSRE 2006)
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, November 6-10, 2006
Abstract
Deriving accurate system requirements from a natural language description is difficult. This paper demonstrates a safety-centered process to refine requirements written in natural language into a more accurate and detailed specification of system requirements. It accomplishes this through an iterative verification and validation of a prototype specified in SpecTRM-RL. A simple requirements model of a safety-critical methane-monitoring subsystem for a coal mine application is introduced and used to illustrate the approach. A number of requirements related safety-critical defects were found and eliminated in the application of the approach to the model.