In many domains, software systems cannot be deployed until authorities judge them fit for use in an intended operating environment. Certification standards and processes have been devised and deployed to regulate operations of software systems and prevent their failures. However, practitioners are often unsatisfied with the efficiency and value proposition of certification efforts. In this study, we compare two certification standards, Common Criteria and DO-178C, and collect insights from literature and from interviews with subject-matter experts to identify design options relevant to the design of standards. The results of the comparison of certification efforts---leading to the identification of design dimensions that affect their quality---serve as a framework to guide the comparison, creation, and revision of certification standards and processes. This paper puts software engineering research in context and discusses key issues around process and quality assurance and includes observations from industry about relevant topics such as recertification, timely evaluations, but also technical discussions around model-driven approaches and formal methods. Our initial characterization of the design space of certification efforts can be used to inform technical discussions and to influence the directions of new or existing certification efforts. Practitioners, technical commissions, and government can directly benefit from our analytical framework.
Design spaces have been widely studied by the design community, where exploring alternatives more systematically is considered good practice @cite_47 @cite_1 @cite_44 . Designers are often described as explorers that use their abilities to assess design options and make informed decisions based on the trade-offs that these options entail. With our study, we attempt to provide an initial contribution to building a design space for software certification standards, so that stakeholders can also make informed decisions when creating or updating standards, empowering them to reason more systematically about the options in the space, similar to how many other areas have done in the past with architectural styles @cite_77 , computer input devices @cite_72 @cite_4 , wireless communication @cite_70 , 3D architectures @cite_30 , and self-adaptive systems @cite_0 .
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_70 @cite_1 @cite_44 @cite_77 @cite_0 @cite_72 @cite_47
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System designers typically use well-studied benchmarks to evaluate and improve new architectures and compilers. We design tomorrow's systems based on yesterday's applications. In this paper we investigate an emerging application, 3D scene understanding, likely to be significant in the mobile space in the near future. Until now, this application could only run in real-time on desktop GPUs. In this work, we examine how it can be mapped to power constrained embedded systems. Key to our approach is the idea of incremental co-design exploration, where optimization choices that concern the domain layer are incrementally explored together with low-level compiler and architecture choices. The goal of this exploration is to reduce execution time while minimizing power and meeting our quality of result objective. As the design space is too large to exhaustively evaluate, we use active learning based on a random forest predictor to find good designs. We show that our approach can, for the first time, achieve dense 3D mapping and tracking in the real-time range within a 1W power budget on a popular embedded device. This is a 4.8× execution time improvement and a 2.8× power reduction compared to the state-of-the-art. A central task in design is deciding what artifact will best satisfy the client's needs, whether that requires creating an artifact or choosing from existing alternatives. A design space identifies and organizes the decisions that must be made, together with the alternatives for those decisions, thereby providing guidance for creating artifacts or a framework for comparing them. The Studying Professional Software Design workshop studied three pairs of professional software designers sketching designs for a traffic signal simulator. A discussion of the design space for the simulation task shows how this design space enables comparison of the designs. It also illustrates the benefits of explicitly considering the design space during design and the risks of failing to do so. You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today. Abstract Designers, during a conceptual design process, do not just synthesize solutions that satisfy initially given requirements, but also invent design issues or requirements that capture important aspects of the given problem. How do they do this? What becomes the impetus for the invention of important issues or requirements? So-called unexpected discoveries', the acts of attending to visuo-spatial features in sketches which were not intended when they were drawn, are believed to contribute to it. The purpose of the present research is to verify this hypothesis. Analysing the cognitive processes of a practising architect in a design session, we found that in about a half of his entire design process there were bi-directional relations between unexpected discoveries and the invention of issues or requirements. Not only did unexpected discoveries become the driving force for the invention of issues or requirements, but also the occurrence of invention, in turn, tended to cause new unexpected discoveries. This has provided empirical evidence for two anecdotal views of designing. First, designing is a situated act; designers invent design issues or requirements in a way situated in the environment in which they design. We call inventions of this sort situated-invention (S-invention). Secondly, a design process progresses in such a way that the problem-space and the solution-space co-evolve. Further, this has brought a pedagogical implication as well as an insight about an important aspect of learning by experience in design.