An Automated Approach for Discovering Functional Risk-Inducing Flaws in Software Designs
Abstract
For safety critical applications, it is necessary to ensure that risk-inducing flaws do not
exist in the final product. To date, many risk-based testing techniques were proposed. The
majority of these techniques address flaws in the implementation. However, since the overhead
of software flaws increases the later they are discovered in the development process, it is
important to test for these flaws earlier in the development process. Few approaches have
addressed the problem of testing for risk-inducing flaws in the design phase. These approaches
are manual approaches, which makes them hard to apply on large complicated software designs.
To address this problem, we propose an automated approach for testing designs for risk-inducing
flaws. To evaluate our approach, we performed an experiment focusing on specifications of
safety critical systems. Our results show that the proposed approach could be effective in
discovering functional flaws in behavioral designs that is exposing a risk.