REU Site: Verification and Validation for Software Safety

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Software safety is critical to many projects conductedby both private industry and the government. After theChallenger accident, NASA adopted a safety policy basedon a National Research Council report that requires everyproject to take an organized and systematic approach toidentify safety hazards or unsafe situations and practices,and to follow appropriate steps to assure adequate safety.At the REU site to be established undergraduates participatein research on verification and validation for softwaresafety: from, initially, a series of training seminars onthe necessary background knowledge, to becoming involvedin one of several specially designed research topicsaccording to their interests. Topics include safety analysis,model construction and simulation, validation test generationand execution, etc. Interaction between the students andfaculty mentors is emphasized. Follow-ups are also conductedwith the students after the summer program to prepare theirresults for presentation at conferences and publication injournals.The research subject is software safety with a focus on theanalysis and integration of failure conditions with functionalspecifications, the use of assertions in formal specifications,and validation not only for testing software under normalconditions but also for showing that unsafe states cannot begenerated by the software as the result of single or multipleerroneous inputs. This project allows students fromunderrepresented groups or universities with limited researchopportunities to experience cutting-edge research in softwareengineering and to gain proficiency in a broadly applicableskill set, including critical thinking, research methods,problem solving, and oral and written communication -- all ofwhich are very important for success in graduate programs andcareers in science and technology research.