Supporting software quality in an integrated safety-critical systems development environment

Research is described, aimed to support traceability in the design of software for safety-critical applications, through the provision of an on-line design journal enabling design decisions and actions to be traced and recorded. The design environment, within which various software design tools may be encapsulated, enables protocol between the user and the design tools to be trapped. This provides software engineering support at the conceptual design stage. An important aim of the research is to enable inferences to be made from the captured protocol, for which the application of artificial intelligence methods is being investigated.