Do We Use the Right Elements for Assurance Case Development?

Assurance case (AC) is a well-structured document to build the stakeholders' confidence towards the critical properties of the system. Graphical notations, such as Graphical Structural Notation (GSN), are used to graphically document the ACs. It has been identified that several research papers do not apply the graphical notations properly. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess the compliance of graphical notations used for ACs development. We assessed the papers based on the GSN standard. We have selected few studies in which the ACs are graphically presented. The results indicate that the elements and the relationship between elements are mostly wrongly presented when the standard tools are not used. For example, in the selected studies, the authors have commonly made mistakes in denoting Assumption and Context elements and SolvedBy and InContextOf relationships. In the conclusion, the study recommends to check the "language" related issues in the ACs.