Process-Based Experiment for Design Tool Assessment in Real-Time Safety-Critical Software Development

The paper presents selected experimental results of evaluating six real-time software development tools for use in safety-critical systems. The experiments were designed to collect data, such as project effort, code size, functionality, traceability, etc., in four stages: preparation, model/code development, measurements, and postmortem. Preliminary experiments were conducted to enable fully controlled experiments for the development of well defined but simple real-time systems. The results give the base for successful determination of tool quality and making preliminary conclusions on potential qualification