M.S. Final Oral Exam: Chin-Kooi Khor

Event
Speaker: 
Chin-Kooi Khor
Thursday, June 1, 2023 - 10:00am
Location: 
235 Atanasoff Hall
Event Type: 

Requirements Analysis of Variability Constraints in a Configurable Flight Software System

Variability constraints are an integral part of the requirements for a configurable system. The constraints specified in the requirements on the legal combinations of options define the space of potential valid configurations for the system-to-be. This thesis reports on our experience with the variability-related requirements constraints of a flight software framework used by multiple space missions. A challenge that we saw for practitioners using the current framework, now open-sourced, is that the specifications of its variability-related requirements and constraints are dispersed across several documents, rather than being centralized in the software requirements specification. Such dispersion can contribute to misunderstandings of the side-effects of design choices, increased effort for developers, and bugs during operations. Based on our experience, we propose a new software variability model, similar to a product-line feature model, in the flight software framework. We describe the structured technique called VarCORE by which our model is developed, demonstrate its use, and evaluate it on a key service module of the flight software. Results show that our lightweight modeling technique helped find missing and inconsistent variability-related requirements and constraints. More generally, we suggest that a variability modeling technique such as this can be an efficient way for developers to centralize the specification and improve the analysis of dispersed variability-related requirements and constraints in other configurable systems.

Committee: Robyn Lutz (major professor), Myra Cohen and Samik Basu