A novel approach to tracing safety requirements and state-based design models

Abstract

Traceability plays an essential role in assuring that software and systems are safe to use. Automated requirements traceability faces the low precision challenge due to a large number of false positives being returned and mingled with the true links. To overcome this challenge, we present a mutation-driven method built on the novel idea of proactively creating many seemingly correct tracing targets (i.e., mutants of a state machine diagram), and then exploiting model checking within process mining to automatically verify whether the safety requirement's properties hold in the mutants. A mutant is killed if its model checking fails; otherwise, it is survived. We leverage the underlying killed-survived distinction, and develop a correlation analysis procedure to identify the traceability links. Experimental evaluation results on two automotive systems with 27 safety requirements show considerable precision improvements compared with the state-of-the-art.