Soware Process Synthesis in Assurance Based Development

Assurance BasedDevelopment (ABD) is a novel approach to the synergistic construction of critical soware systems and their assurance arguments. InABD, theneed for assurance drives a unique process synthesis mechanism that results in a detailed process for building both soware and an argument demonstrating its fitness for use in given operating contexts. In this paper, we introduce the ABD process synthesis mechanism. A key element of ABD process synthesis is the success argument, an argumentwhich documents developers’ rationale for believing that the development effort in progress will result in a system that demonstrably meets an acceptable balance of all stakeholder goals. Such goals include safety and security requirements for systems using the soware as a component and time and budget constraints. We also present the details of a case study in which we used ABD to develop the control soware for a prototype artificial heart pump.