For comprehensibility, we created a uniform table-
based format for all dependability aspects that refers
to metrics and measurements of common types for
the analysis part. Equally, for the architecture part,
the starting point were architecture patterns, which as
industry practice are commonly used in software en-
gineering and software architecture teaching. Thus,
basing the method on common structures and mecha-
nism aided the learnability.
For tool support, here no specific software tools
were requires as only tables and block diagrams had
to be created. Here, the simple presentation allowed
open discussions and the use of blackboard in the val-
idation setting of classroom-based teaching.
In terms of acceptance and usability of the
method, from the student side, the high topicality of
the problem context as well as the chosen application
domains were appreciated. The method itself with
is presentation elements and its proposed process has
not caused problems. The difficulty here was more in
understanding domain knowledge.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The dependability of modern software systems is
due to their deep involvement not only in industrial
production or organisational administration, but also
in our everyday life of critical importance. Conse-
quently this needs to be taught to students as well.
For the classroom, we need a dependability engineer-
ing that takes on-board the critical concerns reliabil-
ity, safety and security, but also does so in in a for-
mat suitable for the constraints of teaching. We use a
table-based structure for analysis and integrated im-
portant metrics into it. The architectural design is
based on architectural patterns to steer the system de-
sign towards important quality criteria.
Overall, the method does not aim at support fully
safety or security-critical applications, but to provide
improved dependability and in particular an improved
awareness of the concerns for a wider range of appli-
cations. This is of particular importance for the de-
scribed training context. Here, the uniformity of the
modelling means should aid online presentation needs
(Kenny and Pahl, 2005; Pahl et al., 2004; Murray
et al., 2003; Lei et al., 2003; Melia and Pahl, 2009;
Fronza et al., 2019). We have taken a first step to-
wards a semantic model in the form of an ontology for
dependability analysis with the table structure (Fang
et al., 2016; Javed et al., 2013; Pahl, 2005), although a
full formalisation would enhance analysis quality. A
remaining challenge is the difficulty of providing do-
main knowledge is a suitable form. While a generic
method can provide for instance metrics and can give
guidance on what differentiates different measure-
ments in terms of orders of magnitude (e.g., 0.99 vs.
0.999), these need to be linked to concretely accept-
able figures that are often domain-specific. Here, we
still aim to improve the method using an industrial
trial.
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