Title
Experimental Comparison of Two Safety Analysis Methods and Its Replication
Abstract
(Background) Empirical Software Engineering (SE) strives to provide empirical evidence about the pros and cons of SE approaches. This kind of knowledge becomes relevant when the issue is whether to change from a currently employed approach to a new one or not. An informed decision is required and is particularly important in the development of safety-critical systems. For example, for the safety analysis of safety-critical embedded systems, methods such as Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) are used. With the advent of model-based systems and software development, the question arises whether safety engineering methods should also be adopted. New technologies such as Component Integrated Fault Trees (CFT) come into play. Industry demands to know the benefits of these new methods over established ones such as Fault Trees (FT). (Methods) For the purpose of comparing CFT and FT with regard to the capabilities of the safety analysis methods (such as quality of the results) and to the participants' rating of the consistency, clarity, and maintainability of the methods, we designed a comparative study as a controlled experiment using a within-subject design. The experiment was run with seven academic staff members working towards their PhD. The study was replicated with eleven domain experts from industry. (Results) Although the analysis of the tasks' solutions showed that the use of CFT did not yield a significantly different number of correct or incorrect solutions, the participants rated the modeling capacities of CFT higher in terms of model consistency, clarity, and maintainability. (Conclusion) From this first evidence, we conclude that CFT have the potential of being beneficial for companies looking for a safety analysis approachfor projects using model-based development.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/ESEM.2013.59
ESEM
Keywords
Field
DocType
model maintainability,safety-critical systems,fault trees analysis,model-driven development,component integrated fault trees,model-based systems,model clarity,safety analysis method,software development,replication,experiment,experimental comparison,avionics,model consistency,safety analysis methods,safety-critical software,se approach,empirical software engineering,model-based development,within-subject design,cft
Failure mode and effects analysis,CLARITY,Systems engineering,Unified Modeling Language,Computer science,Empirical process (process control model),Fault tree analysis,Safety engineering,Maintainability,Software development
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1938-6451
978-0-7695-5056-5
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.59
10
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jessica Jung1264.18
Kai Höfig2222.79
Dominik Domis3857.55
Andreas Jedlitschka438938.38
Martin Hiller5121.14