You are required to read and agree to the below before accessing a full-text version of an article in the IDE article repository.

The full-text document you are about to access is subject to national and international copyright laws. In most cases (but not necessarily all) the consequence is that personal use is allowed given that the copyright owner is duly acknowledged and respected. All other use (typically) require an explicit permission (often in writing) by the copyright owner.

For the reports in this repository we specifically note that

  • the use of articles under IEEE copyright is governed by the IEEE copyright policy (available at http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/copyrightpolicy.html)
  • the use of articles under ACM copyright is governed by the ACM copyright policy (available at http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/)
  • technical reports and other articles issued by M‰lardalen University is free for personal use. For other use, the explicit consent of the authors is required
  • in other cases, please contact the copyright owner for detailed information

By accepting I agree to acknowledge and respect the rights of the copyright owner of the document I am about to access.

If you are in doubt, feel free to contact webmaster@ide.mdh.se

An Experiment in Requirements Engineering and Testing using EARS Notation for PLC Systems

Fulltext:


Authors:

Mikael Ebrahimi Salari, Eduard Paul Enoiu, Wasif Afzal, Cristina Seceleanu

Research groups:

Software Testing Laboratory
Formal Modelling and Analysis of Embedded Systems

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

19th Workshop on Advances in Model Based Testing

Abstract

Regulatory standards for engineering safety-critical systems often demand both traceable requirements and specification-based testing, during development. Requirements are often written in natural language, yet for specification purposes, this may be supplemented by formal or semi-formal descriptions, to increase clarity. However, the choice of notation of the latter is often constrained by the training, skills, and preferences of the designers. The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) addresses the inherent imprecision of natural language requirements with respect to potential ambiguity and lack of accuracy. This paper investigates requirement formalization using EARS and specification-based testing of embedded software written in the IEC 61131-3 language, a programming standard used for developing Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). Further, we investigate, by means of an experiment, how human participants translate natural language requirements into EARS and how they use the latter to test PLC software. We report our observations during the experiments, including the type of EARS patterns participants use to structure natural language requirements and challenges during the specification phase, as well as present the results of testing based on EARS-formalized requirements.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Ebrahimi Salari6673,
author = {Mikael Ebrahimi Salari and Eduard Paul Enoiu and Wasif Afzal and Cristina Seceleanu},
title = {An Experiment in Requirements Engineering and Testing using EARS Notation for PLC Systems},
month = {May},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {19th Workshop on Advances in Model Based Testing},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/6673-}
}