Leonard L. Tripp

A market-driven architecture for software engineering standards

The development and maintenance of quality software involves the effective use of software engineering standards. The development of national and international software engineering standards began in the early 1970s. Since that time more than 300 standards have been developed. From a users perspective, there is duplication, inconsistencies, overlap and omissions. In the 1980s the two major international standards organizations formed a joint technical committee on information technology to deal with a range of standards including those for software. A market-driven architecture for software engineering standards has been developed to: guide the development and organization of international software engineering standards; position those standards in relation to standards for quality systems (ISO 9000 series) and system-related standards dependability (IEC TC56), safety-critical (IEC SC65A), and security (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC27); and promote the adoption of software engineering standards in the marketplace.

Contemporary software development environments

framework for critical research and development issues. Group 4, Language Environments, was to consider developmen t environments built around and in support of a programming language. Dr. Marvin Zelkowitz chaired Group 4. The personalities an d interests of the participants and the group interaction caused a somewhat different path to be taken in some of the groups. Group 1 focused clearly on the near-terns and set forth concrete recommendations while Group 2 concentrated on short-term researc h questions. Group 4 considered language issues, while Group 3 addressed itself to the farthest reaches of the research tim e continuum. Report Organizatio n This report mirrors the organization of the workshop itself. The next four chapters present the deliberations of each of the fou r working groups. Summaries for each and for the workshop as a whole follow in Chapter 6. In order to more clearly delineate th e domain of each working group and to stimulate thought prior to the workshop, questions were generated for each group. These set s of questions and issues appear in Appendix B. Workshop participants are listed in Appendix A. The software development environment consists of the methods, techniques and tools which are used during the development of a software system. Early environments consisted of a compiler and a linking loader. Later environs included editors and debuggers , informal requirements and design methods and simple programming standards. Many new methods and software tools have bee n formulated and built during the last decade and. the software development environment has evolved into a rich structure o f development technology. It is estimated, for example, that there are now more than 400 commercially available softwar e development tools. Standards sponsored a workshop on software development environments at Ranch o Sante Fe, California. One of the several groups at the workshop was assigned the task of studying near-term environments. Thes e are environments that could be built within the next two or three years using state-of-the-art technology. The model for the environments that were considered was that of a toolbox : a collection of automated tools and methods that could be used to buil d quality programs. The toolbox group was successful in designing a succession of increasingly complex environments. It also discussed the problems of tool and method integration and a simple powerful approach to this problem was proposed. This report describes the basic features of the tool …

International standards on system and software integrity

m In recent years, the increased use of software in critical applications such as nuclear power plants, medical systems, transportation systems, financial systems, and environmental systems has necessitated the development of guidelines to ensure that this software meets certain criteria for prudent performance. Each of these applications carries some form of risk, with welldefined consequences. A standard developed jointly by IEC TC 56/WG10 and ISO/IEC JTC1/WG9 has the concept of integrity level as its unifying theme. The integrity level is a “negotiated” containment of risk based on an integrity target established by the parties concerned. Risk cannot be contained in the software alone, as software operates in a system as one of its functions. Risk must be addressed from a system perspective to determine its magnitude and the means to contain it. For the standard under discussion, TC 56/WG10 provides the system perspective, while ISO/IEC JTC1/WG9 provides the software perspective. This article describes the requirements for the standard, the concept of operations for integrity-level process, the key features of the standard, and the means to produce the systems and software integrity-level standard. The article also describes a proposed program of work, based on the integrity-level concept, being pursued jointly by the two working groups. he purpose of this article is to describe how integrity-level standards are used; describe the system and software-level program; describe how a set of integrity-level standards is being developed; and describe the key features of the basic standard in the joint system and software integrity-level program.

CASE evaluation and selection bibliography

In 1989, a working group of the Computer Society ol the IEEE was formed to produce a Recommended Practice for the Evaluation of CASE Tools. As part ol that effort, the following bibliography was assembled. If references of particular significance have been omitted, Ihe author would appreciate hearing about them for inclusion in later editions of this bibliography.