Requirements to Products and Processes for Software of Safety Important NPP I&C Systems

Features of software as a component of instrumentation and control (I&C) systems are analyzed. Attention is paid to the importance of functions performed by software and hazards of such software. Requirements for characteristics of software as a component of I&C systems are analyzed. Different regulatory documents are considered in order to disclose common approaches to the use of dedicated software and off-the-shelf software components. Classification of software, as well as classification of requirements, is described. Criteria of selection and structuring of requirements, as well as criteria for software verification, are defined. As long as the characteristics of software components directly depend on the quality of the processes of software development and verification, requirements for software life cycle processes are considered.

Life cycle of the software of engineering objects

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the software life cycle of engineering objects. To implement the processes and relevant procedures aimed at ensuring, as well as maintaining proper management of the level of software quality at the stages of the life cycle, it is proposed to use the life cycle model as a methodological basis for achieving the goal - achieving the proper level of consumer quality of the final product, taking into account the conditions and circumstances. exploitation.. The considered model of the life cycle in the framework of software engineering is a structure that determines the sequence of implementation and relationships of processes and procedures of a different nature that may arise when performing any actions in relation to software, from the emergence of a need for this software and ending with its final withdrawal from use. If necessary, the life cycle model has a relationship with the content, scale and complexity of the corresponding project, on the characteristics of the conditions and circumstances under which a particular software is created and operated. At the same time, the existence of a life cycle model, carefully developed at the same time, adequate to the existing conditions and circumstances, is the basis for the implementation of general quality management within the framework of a program project, which at this point in time is stipulated as a methodological basis for obtaining a project at the output of an object that meets the presented requirements and modern quality standards. The main reasons for the need to pay special attention to modeling the life cycle of the software being developed and the component of the environment surrounding the software at different stages of its life cycle, taking into account the life cycle of material engineering objects, are presented. Taking into account the presented concept of the life cycle implementation in some virtual enterprise, the software sequentially performs the transition from one state to the next, from consumer properties specified by the customer to an already finished software product and quite real consumer properties supported by the corresponding characteristics, this software is in operation to moral aging, and also goes into a state characterized by the modernization or removal of this software from use. Key words: software, engineering object, software life cycle model, software development, engineering activities

Analyzing Static Analysis Metric Trends towards Early Identification of Non-Maintainable Software Components

Nowadays, agile software development is considered a mainstream approach for software with fast release cycles and frequent changes in requirements. Most of the time, high velocity in software development implies poor software quality, especially when it comes to maintainability. In this work, we argue that ensuring the maintainability of a software component is not the result of a one-time only (or few-times only) set of fixes that eliminate technical debt, but the result of a continuous process across the software’s life cycle. We propose a maintainability evaluation methodology, where data residing in code hosting platforms are being used in order to identify non-maintainable software classes. Upon detecting classes that have been dropped from their project, we examine the progressing behavior of their static analysis metrics and evaluate maintainability upon the four primary source code properties: complexity, cohesion, inheritance and coupling. The evaluation of our methodology upon various axes, both qualitative and quantitative, indicates that our approach can provide actionable and interpretable maintainability evaluation at class level and identify non-maintainable components around 50% ahead of the software life cycle. Based on these results, we argue that the progressing behavior of static analysis metrics at a class level can provide valuable information about the maintainability degree of the component in time.

Software Testing: Data Kart and Integrated Pipeline Approach

With the evolution of the Digital Era and growing demand of automation from the manual effort, the demand of Software and automated applications increases and it will keep increasing day by day. With the increase in application and software, the quality of product and quality assurance become a vital role in any software life cycle. To maintain the quality and final release cycle of software, Software Testing becomes a key challenge one can face. Software testing plays an important role from the beginning till the release of the application. Current paper focuses on traditional testing phase along with enhanced data-driven and pipeline integrated techniques to maintain the best quality of software.

Software maintenance improvement in small software companies: Reflections on experiences

Software maintenance has been recognized as the most demanding and costly phase in the software life cycle. Software maintenance tasks, although require a more complex set of skills and knowledge, are far less interesting to software engineers than software development tasks. In addition, insight into the scholarly literature revealed that the knowledge basis on software maintenance is significantly less than the knowledge base on software development. Due to the obvious constraints of small software companies, they do not have time, people, and other resources for assessing and improving their software maintenance practice. This paper presents the author’s reflections on experience in assessing and improving software maintenance practice in an indigenous micro software company.

ScrumOntoBDD: Agile software development based on scrum, ontologies and behaviour-driven development

When developing a Learning Management System (LMS) using Scrum, we noticed that it was quite often necessary to redefine some system behaviour scenarios, due to ambiguities in the requirement specifications, or due to misinterpretations of stories reported by the Product Owners (POs). The definition of test suites was also cumbersome, resulting in test suites that were incomplete or did not at all comply with the system requirements. Based on this experience and to deal with these problems, in this paper, we propose the ScrumOntoBDD approach to agile software development, which combines Scrum, ontologies and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). This approach is centred on the concepts and techniques of Scrum and BDD and focuses on the planning and analysis phases of the software life cycle, since the BDD tools currently provide little support to these phases, while most of the problems during the LMS development were found exactly there. We claim that our approach improves the software development practices in this respect. Furthermore, ScrumOntoBDD employs ontologies in order to reduce ambiguities intrinsic to the use of a natural language as a BDD ubiquitous language. In this paper, we illustrate and systematically evaluate our approach, showing that it is beneficial since it improves the communication between members of an agile development team.