Software component run-time characteristics are largely dependent on their actual deployment situation. Validating software components i.e., confirming that they meet functional and nonfunctional property requirements, is time-consuming and for some properties quite challenging. We describe the use of “validation agents” to automate the testing of deployed software components to verify that the...

We present a simulation-based method designed to establish that software developed to fit a specific Bayesian model works properly, capitalizing on properties of Bayesian posterior distributions. We illustrate the validation technique with two examples. The validation method is shown to find errors in software when they exist and, moreover, the validation output can be informative about the nat...

Validation and verification techniques have been identified as suitable mechanisms to determine if the software meets the needs of the user and to verify if the software works correctly. However, the existing verification techniques do not support friendly visualization. Also, validation techniques with friendly visualization mechanisms do not allow the verification of the system’s correctness....

Software verification and validation activities are essential for software quality but also constitute a large part of software development costs. Therefore efficient and costeffective software verification and validation activities are both a priority and a necessity considering the pressure to decrease time-to-market and intense competition faced by many, if not all, companies today. It is th...

Context: Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) has emerged as a thriving approach for software products constructions. In SPLE, a triumphant software product is highly reliant on the validity of an SPLE. Hence, validation is a significant process within SPLE. Objective: In this paper, we reviewed the related works in the area of automated validation of SPLE to bring to light the pros and con...

Embedded hard real-time systems need reliable guarantees for the satisfaction of their timing constraints. During the last years sophisticated analysis tools for timing analysis at the code-level, controllerlevel and networked system-level have been developed. This trend is exemplified by two tools: AbsInt’s timing analyzer aiT, and and Symtavision’s SymTA/S. aiT determines safe upper bounds fo...

Any single error in critical software can have catastrophic consequences. Even though failures are usually not advertised, some software bugs have become famous, such as the error in the MIM-104 Patriot. For space systems, experience shows that software errors are a serious concern: more than half of all satellite failures from 2000 to 2003 involved software. To address this concern, this paper...

This paper explores a new approach to validating software implementations that have been produced from formally-verified algorithms. Although visual inspection gives some confidence that the implementations faithfully reflect the formal models, it does not provide complete assurance that the software is correct. The proposed approach, which is based on animation of formal specifications, compar...

Although experimentation is an accepted approach toward scientific validation in most scientific disciplines, it only recently has gained acceptance within the software development community. In this paper we discuss a 12-model classification scheme for performing experimentation within the software development domain. We evaluate over 600 published papers in the computer science literature and...