Projects: Prototyping

Verification and validation (see figure) are important steps of each development process. Our goal is to support both by the application of prototypes. In general, validation should be carried out as early as possible as a late identification of errors leads to costly feedback in the development process. Therefore, if prototyping is applied during requirements analysis or even earlier during problem analysis, the system requirements will be of a higher quality (e.g. completeness). This is because the stakeholders are involved early in the process and are able to clarify desired properties of the system. Further, prototypes aid the developers in verifying the system. By applying appropriate tests, many dynamic properties of the system can be evaluated.

By providing tools and interfaces between control system components (testbed and simulators ), the prototyping environment that is developed within our working group allows a development team to efficiently create prototypes, execute planned test cases and measure properties with suitable effort. Prototyping early in the development process is supported by extending partial systems with generated components to reach at an executable system.

Prototyping can also be used in later development phases, i.e. accompanying the development process, where partitioning of the systems becomes necessary or the integration of hardware is considered. Further, dynamic behavior and non-functional properties can be determined (dynamic analysis) by instrumenting prototypes and developing models for the evaluation of the data gathered during runs of the prototype.

As is true for all methods in the context of developing large systems, efficiency plays an important role. Therefore, prototyping needs to be tightly integrated into the overall development process and the benefit, e.g. an increase of product quality, must be reached with a justifiable effort. Therefore, time consuming steps in the prototyping process need to be supported by tools .