Uncovering the Main Research Themes of Software Validation

Software validation is an attempt to ensure the product fulfills its specific intended purpose. Software validation is very important since software is widely embedded in devices, and these devices are ubiquitous in our daily life nowadays. As software is getting more complex, the software validation process is getting more complicated and time consuming. The study of software validation is therefore an important active research field with voluminous publications. The sheer volume of software validation related literatures hinders our comprehending of its content and context. We therefore utilize the intellectual structure construction and knowledge domain visualization techniques developed by the information scientist to ease the task of understanding the main themes of this research domain. Base on the analysis, we can see the research themes of software validation may be divided into two main groups: the first one deals with systems with interweaving hardware and software related issues, such as real-time systems, parallel systems; the other one deals with model checking related issues, including automata theory and temporal logic.