Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

1999

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair

John R. Callahan.

Abstract

Verification and Validation (V&V) is currently performed during application development for many systems, especially safety-critical and mission-critical systems. However, the V&V process has been limited to single system development. This dissertation describes the extension of V&V from an individual application system to a product line of systems that are developed within an architecture-based software engineering environment.;In traditional V&V, the system provides the context under which the software will be evaluated, and V&V activities occur during all phases of the system development lifecycle. The transition to a product line approach to development removes the individual system as the context for evaluation, and introduces activities that are not directly related to a specific system. This dissertation presents an approach to V&V of software product lines that uses the domain model and the domain architecture as the context for evaluation, and enables V&V to be performed throughout the modified lifecycle introduced by domain engineering.;This dissertation presents three advances that assist in the adaptation of V&V from single application systems to a product line of systems. The first is a framework for performing V&V that includes the activities of traditional application-level V&V, and extends these activities into domain engineering and into the transition between domain engineering and application engineering. The second is a detailed method to extend the crucial V&V activity of criticality analysis from single system development to a product line of systems. The third advance is an approach to enable formal reasoning, which is needed for high assurance systems, on systems that are based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products.

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