Automatic Test Generation to Improve Scrum for Safety Agile Methodology

Abstract

Continuous compliance and living traceability, i.e., assure the technical quality of the software during the incremental flow of the agile process and trace the requirements’ implementation at any time during the development cycle, are two of the most challenging aspects of adopting agile methodologies in the safety critical domain. This is even more true when either user requirements are unstable, the knowledge of the product to be delivered is not enough, or there is no clear interfaces between various hardware/software subsystems, as it may be in a research and development context. In order to reduce the overall cost of these activities, in this manuscript, we discuss benefits resulting from adopting a semi-automatic method to perform continuous compliance and living traceability. The method aims to finding inconsistency between artifacts produced at the end of each iteration by exploit automatic generation of unit tests and coverage metrics. We validated the applicability of the proposed methodology over a real case study from the railway domain, proving it can find inconsistency between several regulations-required artifacts, including the requirements specification, the architectural specification, test specifications and their implementation, and the software implementation.