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Assessing the quality of industrial avionics software: an extensive empirical evaluation

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Abstract

A real-time operating system for avionics (RTOS4A) provides an operating environment for avionics application software. Since an RTOS4A has safety-critical applications, demonstrating a satisfactory level of its quality to its stakeholders is very important. By assessing the variation in quality across consecutive releases of an industrial RTOS4A based on test data collected over 17 months, we aim to provide a set of guidelines to 1) improve the test effectiveness and thus the quality of subsequent RTOS4A releases and 2) similarly assess the quality of other systems from test data. We carefully defined a set of research questions, for which we defined a number of variables (based on available test data), including release and measures of test effort, test effectiveness, complexity, test efficiency, test strength, and failure density. With these variables, to assess the quality in terms of number of failures found in tests, we applied a combination of analyses, including trend analysis using two-dimensional graphs, correlation analysis using Spearman’s test, and difference analysis using the Wilcoxon rank test. Key results include the following: 1) The number of failures and failure density decreased in the latest releases and the test coverage was either high or did not decrease with each release; 2) increased test effort was spent on modules of greater complexity and the number of failures was not high in these modules; and 3) the test coverage for modules without failures was not lower than the test coverage for modules with failures uncovered in all the releases. The overall assessment, based on the evidences, suggests that the quality of the latest RTOS4A release has improved. We conclude that the quality of the RTOS4A studied was improved in the latest release. In addition, our industrial partner found our guidelines useful and we believe that these guidelines can be used to assess the quality of other applications in the future.

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Notes

  1. This is the result of NoTC RM divided by the sum of NoTC L+S and NoTC HS for rows R3 to R5, respectively, in Table 6.

  2. Calculated as NoTC AM divided by the sum of NoTC L+S and NoTC HS for row R3 in Table 6.

  3. It is computed by NoTC HS /(NoTC HS  + NoTC L+S ).

  4. Microsoft’s name for the operating system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista for details.

  5. An open-source platform. See www.eclipse.org for details.

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Acknowledgments

This research is jointly supported by the Technology Foundation Program (JSZL2014601B008) of the National Defense Technology Industry Ministry, the State Key Laboratory of the Software Development Environment (SKLSDE-2013ZX-12). This work was also supported by the MBT4CPS project funded by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 240013/O70) under the category of Young Research Talents of the FRIPO funding scheme. Tao Yue and Shaukat Ali are also supported by the EU Horizon 2020 project U-Test (http://www.u-test.eu/) (grant no. 645463), the RFF Hovedstaden funded MBE-CR (grant no. 239063) project, the Research Council of Norway funded Zen-Configurator (grant no. 240024/F20) project, and the Research Council of Norway funded Certus SFI (grant no. 203461/O30) (http://certus-sfi.no/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Ji Wu, Jie Tian & Chao Liu

  2. Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway

    Shaukat Ali & Tao Yue

  3. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Tao Yue

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  1. Ji Wu
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  2. Shaukat Ali
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  3. Tao Yue
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  5. Chao Liu
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Correspondence to Ji Wu.

Additional information

Communicated By: Brian Robinson

This paper is the extended version of the conference paper published in the 24th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2013).

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Wu, J., Ali, S., Yue, T. et al. Assessing the quality of industrial avionics software: an extensive empirical evaluation. Empir Software Eng 22, 1634–1683 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9440-x

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