Assessment of Software Development Tools for Safety-critical Real-time Systems

The paper presents guidelines on criteria and procedures for evaluating software development tools used in safety-critical real-time systems. We present, first, a view of the taxonomy of software development tools from the perspective of the development process and the development environment. The investigation concentrates on evaluating the design tools, considering their interfaces with the requirements and testing phases of the software lifecycle. Furthermore, we discuss the taxonomy of criteria for tool evaluation. The major observations are related to the differences between evaluating the tool itself (macro-evaluation), evaluating the process of producing the tool (meta-evaluation), and evaluating products developed with this tool (micro-evaluation). Building the criteria for evaluation is based on the triad: choosing an appropriate attribute (property) of the tool, describing the metric for the evaluation of this property, and applying some measure (measurement procedure) to use the metric and obtain the results of evaluation of this property. Copyright © 2003 IFAC