Assurance-Driven Design

The design of assurance cases has been hampered by the posit-and-prove approach to software and systems engineering; it has been observed that, traditionally, a product is produced and then evidence from the development is looked for to build an assurance case. Although assured development is possible, there has been a recent drive towards the proactive design of the assurance case. Assurance-driven design is a development method that considers the assurance argument - similar to an assurance case - to be as important as the product. In this paper, we introduce assurance-driven design, as part of our problem oriented engineering framework, and show how software and assurance argument can be built together.