Applied Research on Software Verification and Evolution (APPROVE)

Society increasingly depends on software systems. For example, complex safety-critical software is embedded in many systems across most industry sectors, ranging from automotive and aerospace, to energy and maritime. In the context of evolving software systems with typical life spans of 10 to 20 years, the unavoidable and often unanticipated changes to system requirements and platform technical characteristics make it difficult to achieve and sustain high system dependability. It is therefore necessary to develop technologies to effectively support software verification and evolution activities such as testing, inspections, change impact analysis, refactoring and re-engineering. Across most software development organizations, however, such activities tend to be extremely expensive, unsystematic, and rather ineffective. This project encompasses a variety of research endeavors to reduce the costs and improve the effectiveness of the verification, validation and evolution of large-scale, complex software-based systems. Our approach is based on model-driven engineering principles, that is, the use of models of the system to drive activities such as automated testing or safety analysis. Many of our solutions rely on modeling standards such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its extensions (SysML, MARTE). Though we at present have a strong focus on various aspects of software testing, our current work also includes other important aspects of verification, validation and evolution, such as model-based analysis of non-functional properties, automated inspections, safety analysis and certification, and system integration.