Tool Intensive Software Development: New Challenges for Verification, Validation, and Certification

Abstract

As we are moving from a traditional software development process to a new development paradigm where the process it largely driven by tools and automation, new challenges for verification and validation (V&V) emerge. Productivity improvements will in this new paradigm be achieved through reduced emphasis on unit testing of code, increased reliance on automated analysis tools applied in the specification domain, and trustworthy code generation. The V&V effort will now be largely focused on assuring that the emph{formal specifications are correct} and that the emph{tools are trustworthy} so we can rely on the results of the analysis and code generation without extensive additional testing of the resulting implementation.

Note here that, in our opinion, the possibility of reducing or fully automating the costly unit-testing efforts are key to the success of this new development paradigm. We have found little support for this type of development if modeling and analysis are to be performed in emph{addition} to what is currently done---these new techniques must either make current efforts more efficient or replace some currently required V&V activity. In either case, our increased reliance on tools requires that they can be trusted---this poses new challenges for V&V and certification.