Traceability and sysml design slices to support safety inspections: A controlled experiment

Certifying safety-critical software and ensuring its safety requires checking the conformance between safety requirements and design. Increasingly, the development of safety-critical software relies on modeling, and the System Modeling Language (SysML) is now commonly used in many industry sectors. Inspecting safety conformance by comparing design models against safety requirements requires safety inspectors to browse through large models and is consequently time consuming and error-prone. An important concern in relation to traceability is cost effectiveness. Making traceability cost effective requires a careful analysis of the trade-offs between the costs incurred over establishing and maintaining traceability links and the benefits that traceability offers. Traceability is considered worthwhile if it presents a significant advantage for achieving certain goals. In our case, the goals pursued from traceability are to increase the correctness and decrease the effort associated with design safety inspections.