Yang Wang

Yang Wang, Stefan Wagner

Context: Agile development is in widespread use, even in safety-critical domains. Motivation: However, there is a lack of an ap- propriate safety analysis and verification method in agile development. Objective: In this paper, we investigate the use of Behavior Driven De- velopment (BDD) instead of standard User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for safety verification with System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) for safety analysis in agile development. Method: We evaluate the effect of this combination in a controlled experiment with 44 students in terms of productivity, test thoroughness, fault detection effectiveness and com- munication effectiveness. Results: The results show that BDD is more effective for safety verification regarding the impact on communication effectiveness than standard UAT, whereas productivity, test thorough- ness and fault detection effectiveness show no statistically significant difference in our controlled experiment. Conclusion: The combination of BDD and STPA seems promising with an enhancement on communica- tion, but its impact needs more research.

Dirk Pflüger, Miriam Mehl, Julian Valentin et al.

Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry. Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is why simulation software engineering (SSE) is emerging lately as a research focus. The dichotomous trade-off between scalability and efficiency (SE) on the one hand and maintainability and portability (MP) on the other hand is one of the core challenges. We report on the SE/MP trade-off in the context of an ongoing systematic literature review (SLR). After characterizing the issue of the SE/MP trade-off using two examples from our own research, we (1) review the 33 identified articles that assess the trade-off, (2) summarize the proposed solutions for the trade-off, and (3) discuss the findings for SSE and future work. Overall, we see evidence for the SE/MP trade-off and first solution approaches. However, a strong empirical foundation has yet to be established; general quantitative metrics and methods supporting software developers in addressing the trade-off have to be developed. We foresee considerable future work in SSE across scientific communities.