Safety Inspection Workbench (SIWOB)

Status:

completed 12/2014

Aims:

• Exploring of a documentation infrastructure that allows to map testing processes for machine software and to support involved actors in their activities by using appropriate tools. Target group are all actors directly or indirectly involved in an inspection.
• Extracting of new knowledge with relevance for software testing processes. This should be suitable for manufacturers to support testing processes through the provision of targeted information as well as to benefit to other auditors and testing institutes with new approaches to improving test processes.

Activities/Methods:

During the project testing methods, practices and standards were examined for methodological procedures that are related to software testing. On this basis a process diagram has been designed which ideally describes the sequence of an examination from the manufacturer's and from the auditor view in the form of a good practice workflow and highlights subprocesses with special relevance for software testing. Activities have been identified that can be supported by tools and obtaining particularly high acceptance. Furthermore an evaluation method was developed in form of a quality index, which allows to assess the excellence of software documentation formats.

Results:

A Container Format has been developed which combines all information of software testing in a structured form, by taking up a variety of document types. These include numerous meta information and makes document changes visible and easier to understand for the user. In addition a human- and machine-readable specification format has been developed which supports the process of specification creation by an appropriate tool. On this basis other tools were developed which allow traceability, versioning, difference visualization and an integrity check.

All tools correspond to the principle of service-oriented architecture and arrange themselves as a lot of loose processes that can be connected and used on a prototypical BUS System (SIWOB Workbench). Furthermore, an approach to an active form template was designed for a common word processing system for collecting data for a software specification. This template ensures consistency and content checks and the maintenance of structural guidelines.

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