Abstract
In order to achieve high safety standards, avionic software needs to be developed with very high requirements regarding safety, reliability, and determinism as well as real-time constraints, which are often in conflict with the development of maintainable software systems. Nevertheless, the ability to change the software of an airplane is of increasing importance, since it consists of a multitude of partially hardware-specific subsystems which may need replacement during a plane’s lifespan of typically numerous decades. Thus, as a first step towards optimizing maintainability of avionic software we have benchmarked the cabin software of a commercial airliner with common software metrics. Such a benchmarking of avionic software contributes valuable insights into the current practice of developing critical software and the application of software metrics in this context. We conclude from the obtained results that it is important to pay more attention to long-term maintainability of aviation software. Additionally we have derived some initial recommendations for the development of future avionic software systems.
Highlights
It is a fact that requirements for avionic software in terms of safety, reliability, and predictability need to adhere to very rigorous standards and software used within avionic systems must be certified before it is allowed to fly
Our work extends the existing body of knowledge with the following long neglected contributions: first, it presents the results of measuring a large piece of embedded software with a comprehensive set of common software metrics
In order to avoid or at least minimize the effects of such malfunctions in avionic systems, every airplane needs to adhere to guidelines issued by the Federal Avionic Administration in the US (FAA, cf., e.g., Chilenski and Miller [12]) and the European Avionic Safety Agency (EASA), respectively
Summary
It is a (relaxing) fact that requirements for avionic software in terms of safety, reliability, and predictability need to adhere to very rigorous standards and software used within avionic systems must be certified before it is allowed to fly. In this paper we do present the results of our efforts, and a comparison with recently published benchmarks from other domains and an analysis of correlations discovered between various metrics In order to give a more detailed overview of this work, we briefly summarize its main contributions in the following: the focus of this case study presented here was on analyzing maintainability and changeability of a recent avionic software system, with the focus of making suggestions about improvements for current development standards and designs. We expect all metrics that have been proposed for predictor models in the literature to be independent from each other, that is, there is no correlation between them detectable
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