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Assurance cases for scientific computing software

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Assurance cases, which provide an organized and explicit argument for correctness, should be used for certifying Scientific Computing Software (SCS), especially when the software impacts health and safety. Assurance cases have already been effectively used for safety cases for real time systems. Their advantages for SCS include engaging domain experts, producing only necessary documentation, and providing evidence that can potentially be verified/replicated by a third party. This paper illustrates assurance cases for SCS through the correctness case for 3dfim+, an existing medical imaging application. No errors were found in 3dfim+. However, the example still justifies the value of assurance cases, since the existing documentation is shown to have ambiguities and omissions, such as an incompletely defined ranking function and missing details on the coordinate system convention adopted. In addition, a potential concern for the software itself is identified: running the software does not produce any warning about the necessity of using data that matches the assumed parametric statistical model.

References

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Fletcher J. Buckley, A.M. Davis, and J.W. Horch. 1993. IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications. Technical Report. The institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., New York, USA.
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Jeffrey C. Carver, Richard P. Kendall, Susan E. Squires, and Douglass E. Post. 2007. Software Development Environments for Scientific and Engineering Software: A Series of Case Studies. In ICSE '07: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 550--559.
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CSA. 2009. Guideline for the application of N286.7-99, Quality assurance of analytical, scientific, and design computer programs for nuclear power plants. Technical Report N286.7.1-09. Canadian Standards Association, 5060 Spectrum Way, Suite 100, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L4W 5N6, 1-800-463-6727.
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Anders Eklunda, Thomas Nichols, and Hans Knutssona. 2016. A methodology for safely case development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 113, 28 (2016), 7900--7905.
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Mojdeh Sayari Nejad. 2017. A Case Study in Assurance Case Development for Scientific Software. Master's thesis. McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
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David J. Rinehart, John C. Knight, and Jonathan Rowanhill. 2015. Current Practices in Constructing and Evaluating Assurance Cases with Applications to Aviation. Technical Report CR-2014-218678. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Langley Research Centre, Hampton, Virginia.
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Alan Wassyng, Neeraj Kumar Singh, Mischa Geven, Nicholas Proscia, Hao Wang. Mark Lawford, and Tom Maibaum. 2015. Can Product-Specific Assurance Case Templates Be Used as Medical Device Standards? IEEE Design & Test 32, 5 (2015). 45--55.

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  • (2018)Beyond software carpentryProceedings of the International Workshop on Software Engineering for Science10.1145/3194747.3194749(32-39)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2018

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings
May 2018
231 pages
ISBN:9781450356633
DOI:10.1145/3183440
  • Conference Chair:
  • Michel Chaudron,
  • General Chair:
  • Ivica Crnkovic,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Marsha Chechik,
  • Mark Harman
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. assurance cases
  2. medical imaging software
  3. software quality
  4. software requirements specification

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  • (2018)Beyond software carpentryProceedings of the International Workshop on Software Engineering for Science10.1145/3194747.3194749(32-39)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2018

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