Define robustness in software engineering

I would like to start by looking at one of these terms. Specified standards define a set of development criteria that guide the manager is software engineering. The new design must survive longer on the robustness surrogate than the baseline design. Usage notes more and most robust are much more common than the forms ending in er or est.

The paper also provides recommendations on development and maintenance of a robust process. Definition of robust the linux information project. Software architects have wonderful terms like scalability and flexibility but what do these mean in the real world and how do we start to put these into practice. Robustness is also what make it possible to design feedback system based on strongly simpli. Hazard analysis techniques such as fault trees and fishbone diagrams are used to aid the designer in anticipating exceptional conditions. Is the ease with which software may be adapted to changes of specifications. Increasingly, both disciplines must be used in combination to achieve success. It is used to improve software quality and responsive to customer requirements. Is the ability of software to function even in abnormal conditions. The definition of robust in mechanical engineering sciforums. Our goal is to dramatically increase the reliability and robustness of nasas mission related software, and the productivity of its software engineering, through the research, development, application, and transfer of automated software engineering technology that scales to meet nasas software challenges.

Engineering for the enterprise is not a replacement for classical systems engineering. Introduction to software engineeringquality wikibooks. According to the ieee standard glossary of software engineering, robustness is the degree to which a system or component can function correctly in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful. In other words, companies can now develop the best product designs and the best tool designs for a robust stamping process. It is a property of the software to catch error conditions and recover from them in a graceful manner so as not to propagate errors up the. Software engineering techniques 2 software quality correctness. Software engineering for creativity, collaboration, and. The method layer provides technical knowledge for developing software. Since these problems can and do occur in live operation, this session examines how to evaluate a systemthis session examines how to evaluate a system ss robustness within the relative sanctity of the test lab. The capability to cope with unknown errors during execution and provide the system services all. The word robust, when used with regard to computer software, refers to. System performance may be diminished or otherwise altered until the faults are corrected. Purposeful design requires an understanding of each of these requirements and how to measure and evaluate each as part of an integrated systems design. When used to describe software or computer systems, robustcan describe one or more of several qualities.

The extreme programming model recommends taking the best practices that have worked well in the past in program development projects to extreme levels. There can be some synonyms like bombproof or idiotproof. This paper provides a summary of an nescsponsored project to define the meaning of reliability and robustness in terms of human systems integration. As you can see from the definition, robustness involves errors. Ieee standard glossary of software engineering terminology, ieee std 610.

The term is typically used in this sense in the marketing of software or computer systems to emphasize a selling point and does not refer to the first three meanings of the term. Agreement of program code with specifications independence of the actual application of the software system. Software engineering techniques aalborg universitet. Ieee defines software design as both a process of defining, the architecture, components, interfaces, and other characteristics of a system or component and the result of that process. Robust design method, also called the taguchi method, pioneered by dr. The definition of robustness as a quality attribute the ability of an algorithm to continue operating despite abnormalities in input, calculations, and environment is taken from the ieee standard glossary of software engineering terminology radatz et al. The degree to which a system continues to function in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Robustness testing is usually done to test exception handling. I studied engineering and we used the term robust in a more casual parlance when describing something that remains fit for purpose in the face of numerous engineering changes and within a wideranging tolerance. A piece of program that will not crashbehave unexpected when recieving unexpected data as input.

Robustness testing is any quality assurance methodology focused on testing the robustness of software. A set of implicit requirements often goes unmentioned, for example ease of use, maintainability etc. Robust design focuses on improving the fundamental function of the product or process, thus facilitating flexible designs and concurrent engineering. Mesram a method for assessing robustness of measurement. In computer science, robustness is the ability of a computer system to cope with errors during execution and cope with erroneous input.

Here are a few links that discuss what it means to be robust in terms of software. To know if product robustness is improved, the baseline or existing design is broken on the robustness surrogate. Is the ability of software to exactly perform their tasks, as defined by the requirements and specifications. The process layer allows the development of software on time. Robust means its resistant to breakagefailure because it makes few assumptions and is decoupled. More complex still is how to define the meaning of reliability and robustness in terms of human factors. The authors define robust software as a software that works for people. Robustness testing of softwareintensive systems carnegie. By consciously considering the noise factors environmental variation during the products usage, manufacturing variation, and component deterioration and the cost of failure in the field the robust design method helps ensure customer satisfaction. The goal of robustness testing is to develop test cases and test environments where a systems robustness can be assessed. In robustness testing, the software is tested by giving invalid values as inputs. Specific robustness tests for embedded realtime systems are not included in this report. What is the difference between fault tolerance and.

Extreme programming xp is one of the most important software development framework of agile models. Indeed, it is the most powerful method available to reduce product cost, improve quality, and simultaneously reduce development interval. Robustness can encompass many areas of computer science, such as robust programming, robust machine learning, and robust security network. Since software reliability is one of the most important aspects of software quality, reliability engineering approaches are practiced in software field as well. The overall goal of this thesis is to identify gaps in the knowledge and take steps towards improving and creating methods to work with software robustness.

Robustness vs correctness competition software engineering. In computer science, robustness is the ability of a computer system to cope with errors during. Increasing software robustness is a key question for software. Adaptability, flexibility, modifiability and scalability. This article begins with a discussion of ecosystems and includes a large number of footnotes and references for the interested reader. If you think there is one universally agreed upon definition of robust here, good luck. Exception handling electrical and computer engineering. Software design is a phase in software engineering, in which a blueprint is developed to serve as a base for constructing the software system. The document didnt give much insight in how to define those terms in other engineering disciplines. The robustness surrogate should be designed to break the product within minutes, not hours or days the faster the better. On the other hand, you want to have correctness, which basically means the. A software is robust, if any exception raised during its execution, in any architecture and with any initial state, is caught by some exception handler. It means, for instance, handling incorrect user input, either malicious or erroneous, handling lack of re. It should be noted that this last sense of the term robust is not uniformly accepted in technical circles.

Not greatly influenced by errors in assumptions about the distribution of sample errors. Software reliability electrical and computer engineering. Various commercial products perform robustness testing of software analysis. Many of these are equivalent, and some are used to define a specific type of robustness testing. The goal of the research group of the robust software engineering technical area is to dramatically increase the reliability and robustness of nasas mission related software, and the productivity of its software engineering, through the research, development, application, and transfer of automated software engineering technology that scales to meet nasas software. Robustness testing has also been used to describe the process of verifying the robustness i. Robustness is defined as the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions.

Software engineering institute robustness testing of softwareintensive systems. Correctness, reliability, adequacy, learnability, robustness, maintainability, readability, extensibility, testability, efficiency, portability. It is one of the most useful properties of feedback. A proliferation of software reliability models have emerged as people try to understand the characteristics of how and why software fails, and try to quantify software reliability.

A software is robust, if any exception raised during its execution, in any architecture and with. Robustness is the ability of the closed loop system to be insensitive to component variations. Thus the robust measurement program is a program that continuous to operate. The measure or extent of the ability of a system, such as a computer, communications, data processing, or weapons system, to continue to function despite the existence of faults in its component subsystems or parts. The ability of software systems to react appropriately to abnormal conditions. Robust pronounced robuhst is an adjective commonly applied in marketing literature to information technology products in several ways. Today, modern simulation software allows companies to also address stamping robustness issues during the earlier phases of product and tooling design. It defines an outline for a set of key process areas that must be acclaimed for effective delivery of software engineering technology. Robustness is the ability of software to cope with errors during execution. This layer covers a broad array of tasks that include requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, and maintenance. Robustness is one of the nine quality attributes i find important in my thesis.

Testing is a determined, systematic attempt to break a program that you think is working kepi99. Changeability includes the nonfunctional requirements for adaptability, flexibility, modifiability and robustness. Robustness has been defined by the food and drug administration as the degree to which a software system or component can function correctly in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Software fault injection and fuzz testing have been previously used for the resilience and robustness testing of automotive software and avs 33. Systems engineering strategies for uncertainty and. The software engineering institute is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the u.

The concepts presented here are general in nature and can apply to many manufacturing situations. It also includes being adaptable to changing requirements. Robustness definition of robustness by the free dictionary. A software engineering discipline must be iterative, based on feedback, incremental, experimental, and empirical. The seamless integration between design and source code, between modeling and implementation. But i can use this information for various approaches. This 2005 technical note provides guidance and procedures for performing robustness testing as part of dod or federal acquisition programs that have a software component. Robustness has been defined by the food and drug administration as the degree to which a software system or component can function correctly. Information and translations of robustness in the most comprehensive dictionary definitions resource on the web. Defined by the software engineering institute sei at carnegie mellon university. Despite this, its not clear why and in which situations these two might be in conflict. I found some definitions but they were centered on computational engineering.