REU Site: Verification and Validation for Software Safety

University Of Texas At Dallas, Richardson TX

Investigators

Abstract

Software safety is critical to many projects conducted by both private industry and the government. After the Challenger accident, NASA adopted a safety policy based on a National Research Council report that requires every project to take an organized and systematic approach to identify safety hazards or unsafe situations and practices, and to follow appropriate steps to assure adequate safety. At the REU site to be established undergraduates participate in research on verification and validation for software safety: from, initially, a series of training seminars on the necessary background knowledge, to becoming involved in one of several specially designed research topics according to their interests. Topics include safety analysis, model construction and simulation, validation test generation and execution, etc. Interaction between the students and faculty mentors is emphasized. Follow-ups are also conducted with the students after the summer program to prepare their results for presentation at conferences and publication in journals. The research subject is software safety with a focus on the analysis and integration of failure conditions with functional specifications, the use of assertions in formal specifications, and validation not only for testing software under normal conditions but also for showing that unsafe states cannot be generated by the software as the result of single or multiple erroneous inputs. This project allows students from underrepresented groups or universities with limited research opportunities to experience cutting-edge research in software engineering and to gain proficiency in a broadly applicable skill set, including critical thinking, research methods, problem solving, and oral and written communication -- all of which are very important for success in graduate programs and careers in science and technology research.