A case study: validation of guidance control software requirements for completeness, consistency and fault tolerance

We discuss a case study performed for validating a natural language (NL) based software requirements specification (SRS) in terms of completeness, consistency, and fault-tolerance. A partial verification of the Guidance and Control Software (GCS) Specification is provided as a result of analysis using three modeling formalisms. Zed was applied first to detect and remove ambiguity from the GCS partial SRS. Next, Statecharts and Activity-charts were constructed to visualize the Zed description and make it executable. The executable model was used for the specification testing and fault injection to probe how the system would perform under normal and abnormal conditions. Finally, a Stochastic Activity Networks (SANs) model was built to analyze how fault coverage impacts the overall performability of the system. In this way, the integrity of the SRS was assessed. We discuss the significance of this approach and propose approaches for improving performability/fault tolerance.