SOLVING THE ROOT CAUSE OF SOFTWARE COST OVERRUNS

System(or Customer) requirements present issues

Levelling - are they abstract enough from the design?
Ambiguity - do they mean the same to every stakeholder?
Well-formedness - do they cover all aspects of the requirement?
Reviews – are subjective

This leads to mis-understanding, error and cost. Caesar aims to solve these problems by assisting a developer to write clear, concise, unambiguous requirements. This is achieved by enabling suitably precise definitions, providing a data dictionary and combining with text formats that enable well-formed system requirements to be written.

This avoids much of the subjectivity related to review and hence reduces cost impact felt later in the development life cycle.

Benefit 1

Reduces the opportunity for error

Benefit 2

Requirements are verifiable

Benefit 3

Simple compliance to standards

Benefit 4

Automatic checks for consistency

Benefit 1

Reduces the opportunity for error

Benefit 2

Requirements are verifiable

Benefit 3

Simple compliance
to standards

Benefit 4

Automatic checks for consistency

CAESAR IN PRACTICE

System engineers charged with writing requirements for embedded systems are likely to benefit from the use of Caesar, particularly the aspects relating to the software implementation of these requirements.

The difficulty is in being abstract enough to allow a design to evolve but precise enough to be able to eventually convincingly validate that the product meets the requirements. It is also highly desirable to be able to show that the development of system requirements into software requirements has been complete, consistent and accurate.

Caesar links to Kapture to enable verification checks to be undertaken between the software requirements and systems requirements. This reduces uncertainty at the start of a project thus reducing time and cost aswell as enabling updates to rapidly occur.

CREATING SOLUTIONS

D-RisQ has used Caesar to describe required behaviour for a number of systems.

The technology is still under development, but is already showing benefits in highly assured decision making systems for autonomous vehicles in air, maritime and sub-surface and for clients in various sectors ranging from aerospace to nuclear decommissioning. More on Caesar as it completes its development towards Q2 2023.