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.