Toward safe reuse of product family specifications

Robyn R. Lutz
1999 Proceedings of the 1999 symposium on Software reusability - SSR '99  
Upcoming spacecraft plan extensive reuse of software components, to the extent that some systems will form product families of similar or identical units (e.g., a eet of spaceborne telescopes). Missions such as these must be demonstrably safe, but the consequences of broad reuse are hard to evaluate from a software safety perspective. This paper reports experience specifying an interferometer (telescope) subsystem as a product family and supplementing the speci cation with results from a
more » ... analysis. Lessons learned are discussed in three areas: (1) integration of hazards analysis with the product family approach (2) modeling decisions that have safety i mplications (e.g., how to handle near-commonalities, establishing a hierarchy o f v ariabilities, and specifying dependencies among options) and (3) tracing the product family requirements to the design of the reusable components and to the design of a speci c product. The product family approach w as e ective at identifying some latent safety requirements and in validating the design of the reusable software. The product family approach l a c ked an adequate way to distinguish architectural variations from run-time variations in the model.
doi:10.1145/303008.303014 dblp:conf/ssr/Lutz99 fatcat:sbdyqebtonbaxgl26dms6qy754