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Developing Confidence in Software through Credentials and Low-Ceremony Evidence

Developing Confidence in Software through Credentials and Low-Ceremony Evidence. Christopher Scaffidi & Mary Shaw Carnegie Mellon University. Limitations of high-ceremony evidence.

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Developing Confidence in Software through Credentials and Low-Ceremony Evidence

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  1. Developing Confidence in Software through Credentialsand Low-Ceremony Evidence Christopher Scaffidi & Mary Shaw Carnegie Mellon University

  2. Limitations of high-ceremony evidence • When selecting components for reuse, traditional software engineering doctrine says that we should eliminate uncertainty about those components through: • Formal analysis • Intensive testing • Empirical evidence on field use • Correctness-by-construction (generative programming) • Unfortunately, this “high-ceremony evidence” is: • Expensive to obtain • Unobtainable in some cases • Often hard to organize and disseminate evidence  credentials  use cases

  3. Alternative: Low-ceremony evidence • So engineers Live With (some) Uncertainty and typically use “low-ceremony” evidence instead: • Documentation & other vendor claims • Product reviews / expert opinions • Product popularity and reputation • Seller reputation • This evidence often has limitations of its own: • Incomplete and incremental • Low quality (inaccurate, imprecise, ...) • From untrustworthy sources • Inconsistent evidence  credentials  use cases

  4. Approach and requirements for addressing these limitations • Goal: support the use of low and high-ceremony evidence through software annotations that: • Can record many forms of evidence • Can be added/revised incrementally • Can be read/written by analysis & visualization tools • Can be combined by analysis tools • Can record meta-information supporting annotation use • We call these annotations “credentials”. evidence  credentials  use cases

  5. Each credential is an estimate of one software attribute. • Each of a software’s credentials is an annotation <attribute, value, credibility, provenance> • Attribute: identifies some attribute of the software • E.g.: “thread-safety” • Value: identifies the value of that attribute • E.g.: “Apartment” • Credibility: indicates a level of confidence in the value • E.g.: “high” • Provenance: indicates how the value was determined • E.g.: “Fluid analysis toolkit 2.0” evidence  credentials  use cases

  6. We envision that credentials will… • Record findings (output) of high-ceremony techniques, as well as low-ceremony evidence. • Be added incrementally as new analysis techniques become available. • Be combined using domain-appropriate analytical techniques (e.g.: average throughput, worst-case safety) • Enable repository search engines to identify components with credentials meeting certain criteria evidence  credentials  use cases

  7. Thank you… • … to ILWU for the opportunity to participate. • … to NSF and the EUSES Consortium for funding (ITR-0325273, CCF-0438929 and CNS-0613823).

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