A Framework to Support Generation and Maintenance of an Assurance Case

One of the greatest challenges in software intensive systems such as safety critical systems is to ensure software quality assurance (called software assurance for brevity) which encompasses some quality-related attributes such as reliability and security as well as functionality and performance. To this end, engineers prefer a safety case or an assurance case, via Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) to convey the information about software assurance in a system during its development. An assurance case, similar to a legal case, lays out an argumentation-structure with supporting evidence to claim that software assurance in a system is achieved. However, due to complexity of software intensive applications especially heterogeneity of artifacts used as evidence, the creation and management of an assurance case become a challenging issue facing the safety critical domains. In this report, we present a novel framework to automatically generate an assurance case via a safety pattern and further support the maintenance of an assurance case during a system's evolution. Last, we use the Wheel Brake System (WBS) for an aircraft as a case study to illustrate the construction and maintenance of a safety case during a system's evolution.