PaTaS: Quality Assurance for Model-driven Software Development

Abstract

The quality of software products in safety critical applications, extensively found within the space domain, is a key success factor but also a major cost driver. To ensure high quality of the software product, quality assurance processes with quality models and metrics are applied. With these tools and processes, product assurance managers and software developers are able to quantify the quality of the software under development. Within the ESA-funded study PaTaS (Product Assurance with TASTE Study), a product quality model with software and model metrics was developed and implemented in an end-to-end model-driven software development (MDSD) life cycle demonstrator. The goal of this study was to identify applicable concepts to maintain quality and dependability levels when MDSD is applied. This requires the definition of connected model and software quality indicators. These indicators were integrated into ESA’s reference software product quality model (ECSS-Q-HB-80-04A). The resulting adapted quality model got incorporated in a model-driven software development life cycle demonstrator. To evaluate this demonstrator and the integrated quality indicators in a realistic development scenario, mission-critical parts of the command and data handling subsystem of a satellite mission were modelled and subsequently coded. The aim of the activity was to demonstrate the effect of the end-to-end life cycle in combination with the developed quality model on the final onboard software product. In this paper we present the result of the study. The focus is on the quality model for MDSD and new quality metrics for models, which can be embedded in an end-to-end model-driven product development life cycle.