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A case study on testing, commissioning, and operation of very-large-scale software systems

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

Abstract

An increasing number of software systems today are very-large-scale software systems (VLSS) with system-of-systems (SoS) architectures. Due to their heterogeneity and complexity VLSS are difficult to understand and analyze, which results in various challenges for development and evolution. Existing software engineering processes, methods, and tools do not sufficiently address the characteristics of VLSS. Also, there are only a few empirical studies on software engineering for VLSS. We report on results of an exploratory case study involving engineers and technical project managers of an industrial automation VLSS for metallurgical plants. The paper provides empirical evidence on how VLSS are tested, commissioned, and operated in practice. The paper discusses practical challenges and reports industrial requirements regarding process and tool support. In particular, software processes and tools need to provide general guidance at the VLSS level as well as specific methods and tools for systems that are part of the VLSS. Processes and tools need to support multi-disciplinary engineering across system boundaries. Furthermore, managing variability and evolution is success-critical in VLSS verification and validation.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE Companion 2014: Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering
May 2014
741 pages
ISBN:9781450327688
DOI:10.1145/2591062
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 31 May 2014

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  1. Case Study
  2. Verification and Validation
  3. Very-Large-Scale Software Systems

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