Representing Process Characteristics to Increase Confidence in Assurance Case Arguments

摘要

An assurance case is a structured, evidence-based argument demonstrating that a safety or other quality objective of a high integrity system is assured. Assurance cases are required or recommended in many industry domains as a means to convince the regulatory bodies to allow commissioning of such system. To be convincing, an argument should address all potential doubts and thus cover numerous additional issues, including the processes that led to development of the considered system. It is however not obvious, which elements of processes (and which characteristics of them) should be documented and how to include them in the argument without making it too large and complex. In this paper we provide description structures for essential process elements. The structures were developed on the basis of literature search and reviews of publicly available assurance cases. We also show how to include such information within the overall assurance case in a way that reduces the complexity and allows to distinguish process-related elements from the primary argument.