April 2020

Development of conformity assessment guidelines for the software development kit (SDK) for shipbuilding and marine engineering industry ICT

09 April, 2020

Senior Surveyor Woo Jeongjae/ ICT Solution Team

South Korea’s domestic shipbuilding and marine industry is changing its development direction to focus on high value-added technology based on ICT technology. By strengthening the foundation technology, the goal is to enhance the productivity of the shipbuilding and marine industries, to enhance the value of ships, and to support the expansion of global competitiveness.

KR has secured the basic technology for building smart ships and smart shipyards through its participation in the shipbuilding and marine engineering industry’s ICT convergence “Software Development Kit (SDK) and Common Library Development” project, which has been hosted by the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) since 2018.

The projects are organized as the developments of component-based SW integrated development support IDE (product name: MarineWiz), ship/shipyard core library using ICT SW classification system, activation of SW and quality system.

The SDK uses the component-based SW integrated development support tool to perform SW development by combining the core libraries of shipyards and ships that have been verified through the quality system. The application SW development can be supported easily and quickly, by utilizing framework pattern method based on MVVM (Model, View, View-Model) model which UI is separated from business logic.

KR has established a procedure for quality assurance by creating conformity assessment guidelines which support the integration of SW development support tools in the new development process of core libraries to be used for the extension of shipbuilding and offshore applications.

The criteria for the development of conformity assessment guidelines were established in accordance with the ISO / IEC 25000 International Standards document. The requirements analysis was conducted by examining the specifications related to shipbuilding SW quality. In addition, the final conformity assessment checklist was developed by analyzing the ISO / IEC 12207 lifecycle correlations to provide final quality measurement characteristics in accordance with the derived coverage.

By analyzing the correlation between the quality characteristics of each software life cycle, the six quality characteristics of ISO / IEC 25010 quality model have been identified as learnability, user error protection, maturity, confidentiality, testability, and installability. These six quality shows high correlation, which is high degree of importance, in the operation stage of ISO/IEC 12207. In addition, to increase the ratio of the scenario described in the user documentation and to verify that the scenario works properly, the feasibility identification and effectiveness were added as separate indicators.

Characteristics	ID	Name	Description
Appropriateness recognizability	UAp-1-G	Description coverage	degree to which users can recognize whether a product or system is appropriate for their needs
Learnability	ULe-1-G	User guidance coverage	degree to which a product or system can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals of learning to use the product or system with effectiveness, efficiency, freedom from risk and satisfaction in a specified context of use
User error-protection	UEp-2-S	Modified user error-protection	degree to which a system protects users against making errors
Maturity	RMa-4-S	Test coverage	degree to which a system meets needs for reliability under normal operation
Confidentiality	SCo-1-G	Accessible Control	degree to which a product or system ensures that data is accessible only to those authorized to have access
Testability	MTe-3-S	Test restart	degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which test criteria can be established for a system, product or component and tests can be performed to determine whether those criteria have been met
Installability	PIn-2-G	Easy installation	degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which test criteria can be established for a system, product or component and tests can be performed to determine whether those criteria have been met
Effectiveness	Ef-1-G	Tasks completed	The proportion of the tasks that are completed correctly without assistance
Effectiveness	Ef-4-G	Tasks with errors	Proportion of tasks where errors were made by the user

For a software conformity assessment, the indexed software quality characteristics must be derived as measurable functions. ISO / IEC 25000 provides a list of metrics related to quality measurement. The list can be divided into measurements from the perspective of ISO / IEC 25022 users (effectiveness) and measurements from the perspective of ISO / IEC 25023 product quality. The list of metrics provided by ISO / IEC 25022 and 25023 provides a description of the name, ID, and metric, formulas for calculating metric measurements, methods and types that can be used to obtain measurements.

In order to set the quality standards of shipbuilding and offshore software, the standard documents of shipbuilding and offshore ICT SW quality related organizations are analyzed, the detailed standards specified in the product manual and user manual of the software are established, and the software life is considered in relation to the international standards on quality measurement. At the cycle operation stage, the evaluated items were identified as quality characteristics that showed a high degree of correlation, and a quantifiable conformity assessment measurement function was derived.

To evaluate software conformance, the evaluator must select a quality measurement to address the software quality assurance requirements and the conformance assessment requirements should be assigned as being capable of defining each appropriate quality measurement used to assess software quality. The following checklist was developed by defining software quality criteria as evaluation items of measurable requirements and listing them by relevant quality indicators along with evaluation descriptions.

ID	Item	Description
UAp-1-G (Appropriateness recognizability)	(1) Identification Information	Is there information identifying the product, such as the software name or version?
	(2) Supplier Information	Do you specify supplier information such as supplier name, supplier address and website?
	(3) Performance Information	Do you specify the tasks and services that can be performed with the product?
	(4) Component Information	If there is an option or version of the software component, do you specify it?
ULe-1-G (Learnability)	(1) Function Outline	Does it provide an overview of the executable features?
	(2) Usage Information	Do you specify the information required to use the software?
	(3) Function description	Does the product documentation describe all user methods for the described function?
UEp-2-S (User error-protection)	(1) Constraints	Do you specify user constraints such as input value range and maximum number of records?
RMa-4-S (Maturity)	(1) test scope	Have all tests been performed on the required functional descriptions?
SCo-1-G (Confidentiality)	(1) Security Information	If there is a function to prevent unauthorized access to key data, does it specify?
MTe-3-S (Testability)	(1) Management function	If there are separate software management functions, do you specify all the information necessary to run them?
PIn-2-G (Installability)	(1) Installation Information	Do you specify the minimum storage space required to install the software?
	(2) Run the installation	Did you successfully install the software on the product?
	(3) Execute change	Was the software change successful for the product?
	(4) Delete operation	Was the software deleted successfully on the product?
Ef-1-G (Effectiveness)	(1) Function execution	Product documentation Have all the functions been performed?
Ef-4-G (Effectiveness)	(1) Function error	Is the number of errors that occur while the function is operating tolerable?

The evaluation items in the checklist indicate whether the actionable information is specified; Identifiable information about the software, learning about the features, error information you need to be aware of, information about the installation, features about security and management.

In addition, when the user uses the software referring to the specified information, the user can confirm whether the execution of the function and the test scope for the error are covered.

Through this research process, KR not only established quality procedures to efficiently check and evaluate quality measurable conformity assessment items based on international standards, but also assessed the quality of libraries applicable to component-based application software development. It has laid the foundation for standardization research.

This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT in 2020 and supported by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (No.S0510-20-1003, Software Development Kit (SDK) and Common Library)

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