05 Fakultät Informatik, Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/6

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    An industrial case study on the evaluation of a safety engineering approach for software-intensive systems in the automotive domain
    (2016) Abdulkhaleq, Asim; Vöst, Sebastian; Wagner, Stefan; Thomas, John
    Safety remains one of the essential and vital aspects in today's automotive systems. These systems, however, become ever more complex and dependent on software which is responsible for most of their critical functions. Therefore, the software components need to be analysed and verified appropriately in the context of software safety. The complexity of software systems makes defining software safety requirements with traditional safety analysis techniques difficult. A new technique called STPA (Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis) based on system and control theory has been developed by Leveson to cope with complex systems. Based on STPA, we have developed a comprehensive software safety engineering approach in which the software and safety engineers integrate the analysis of software risks with their verification to recognize the software-related hazards and reduce the risks to a low level. In this paper, we explore and evaluate the application of our approach to a real industrial system in the automotive domain. The case study was conducted analysing the software controller of the Active Cruise Control System (ACC) of the BMW Group.
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    An automatic safety-based test case generation approach based on systems-theoretic process analysis
    (2016) Abdulkhaleq, Asim; Wagner, Stefan
    Software safety remains one of the essential and vital aspects in today’s systems. Software is becoming responsible for most of the critical functions of systems. Therefore, the software components in the systems need to be tested extensively against their safety requirements to ensure a high level of system safety. However, performing testing exhaustively to test all software behaviours is impossible. Numerous testing approaches exist. However, they do not directly concern the information derived during the safety analysis. STPA (Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis) is a unique safety analysis approach based on system and control theory, and was developed to identify unsafe scenarios of a complex system including software. In this paper, we present a testing approach based on STPA to automatically generate test cases from the STPA safety analysis results to help software and safety engineers to recognize and reduce the associated software risks. We also provide an open-source safety-based testing tool called STPA TCGenerator to support the proposed approach. We illustrate the proposed approach with a prototype of a software of the Adaptive Cruise Control System (ACC) with a stop-and-go function with a Lego-Mindstorms EV3 robot.
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    XSTAMPP 2.0: new improvements to XSTAMPP Including CAST accident analysis and an extended approach to STPA
    (2016) Abdulkhaleq, Asim; Wagner, Stefan
    XSTAMPP (eXtensible STAMP Platform ) is a software tool developed to serve the widespread adoption and use of STAMP methodologies in different domains. The first version of XSTAMPP supported only the STPA application. In this paper, we present a new version of XSTAMPP, including CAST accident analysis and extended approach to STPA. We developed two new plug-in tools called (1) A-CAST (Automated CAST) which implements the CAST activities and (2) XSTPA (Extended Approach to STPA) which supports automatically generating the context tables which will be used to refine the safety requirements and automatically transform the refined safety requirements into a formal specification in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to support verification activities. XSTAMPP 2.0 is available as an open source platform at our repository http://sourceforge.net/projects/stampp/files/2.0.0/.
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    How are functionally similar code clones syntactically different? An empirical study and a benchmark
    (2016) Wagner, Stefan; Abdulkhaleq, Asim; Bogicevic, Ivan; Ostberg, Jan-Peter; Ramadani, Jasmin
    Background. Today, redundancy in source code, so-called ‘‘clones’’ caused by copy&paste can be found reliably using clone detection tools. Redundancy can arise also independently, however, not caused by copy&paste. At present, it is not clear how only functionally similar clones (FSC) differ from clones created by copy&paste. Our aim is to understand and categorise the syntactical differences in FSCs that distinguish them from copy&paste clones in a way that helps clone detection research. Methods. We conducted an experiment using known functionally similar programs in Java and C from coding contests. We analysed syntactic similarity with traditional detection tools and explored whether concolic clone detection can go beyond syntax. We ran all tools on 2,800 programs and manually categorised the differences in a random sample of 70 program pairs. Results. We found no FSCs where complete files were syntactically similar. We could detect a syntactic similarity in a part of the files in <16% of the program pairs. Concolic detection found 1 of the FSCs. The differences between program pairs were in the categories algorithm, data structure, OO design, I/O and libraries. We selected 58 pairs for an openly accessible benchmark representing these categories. Discussion. The majority of differences between functionally similar clones are beyond the capabilities of current clone detection approaches. Yet, our benchmark can help to drive further clone detection research.
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    On the relationship of inconsistent software clones and faults : an empirical study
    (2016) Wagner, Stefan; Abdulkhaleq, Asim; Kaya, Kamer; Paar, Alexander
    Background: Code cloning - copying and reusing pieces of source code - is a common phenomenon in software development in practice. There have been several empirical studies on the effects of cloning, but there are contradictory results regarding the connection of cloning and faults. Objective: Our aim is to clarify the relationship between code clones and faults. In particular, we focus on inconsistent (or type-3) clones in this work. Method: We conducted a case study with TWT GmbH where we detected the code clones in three Java systems, set them into relation to information from issue tracking and version control and interviewed three key developers. Results: Of the type-3 clones, 17 % contain faults. Developers modified most of the type-3 clones simultaneously and thereby fixed half of the faults in type-3 clones consistently. Type-2 clones with faults all evolved to fixed type-3 clones. Clone length is only weakly correlated with faultiness. Conclusion: There are indications that the developers in two cases have been aware of clones. It might be a reason for the weak relationship between type-3 clones and faults. Hence, it seems important to keep developers aware of clones, potentially with new tool support. Future studies need to investigate if the rate of faults in type-3 clones justifies using them as cues in defect detection.