Monitoring Distributed Systems for Safety Critical Software: A Goal-Driven Approach and Prototype-Tool

The reference company for this paper – a multination organization, Italian branch, which works in the domain of safety-critical systems – evaluated the major tools that the market provides for testing safety-critical software, as not sufficiently featured for her quality improvement goals. Once that we had transformed those goals in detailed technical requirements, and evaluated that it was possible to realize them conveniently in a tool, we passed to analyze, construct, and eventually utilize in field the prototype “Software Test Framework”. This tool allows non-intrusive parallel measurements on different hard-soft targets of a distributed system running under one or more Unix standard OS. This paper reports on the characteristics of Software Test Framework, its architecture, and results from a case study. Based on comparison of results with previous tools, we can say that Software Test Framework is leading to a new concept of tool for the domain of safety critical software.