Poster: Assurance Cases for Scientific Computing Software

Assurance cases, which provide an organized and explicit argument for correctness, should be used for certifying Scientific Computing Software (SCS), especially when the software impacts health and safety. Assurance cases have already been effectively used for safety cases for real time systems. Their advantages for SCS include engaging domain experts, producing only necessary documentation, and providing evidence that can potentially be verified/replicated by a third party. This paper illustrates assurance cases for SCS through the correctness case for 3dfim+, an existing medical imaging application. No errors were found in 3dfim+. However, the example still justifies the value of assurance cases, since the existing documentation is shown to have ambiguities and omissions, such as an incompletely defined ranking function and missing details on the coordinate system convention adopted. In addition, a potential concern for the software itself is identified: running the software does not produce any warning about the necessity of using data that matches the assumed parametric statistical model.