Assurance Provenance: The Next Challenge in Software Documentation

High-assurance software is often used in safety- and missioncritical systems where loss of functionality can lead to loss of life or property. Naturally, such systems need to be certified before use and several technologies have been developed to support such efforts. The techniques build structured assurance arguments to justify the safety and performance of the system. Most frequently, software is certified as part of a larger system where that larger system changes rather infrequently. However, this contradicts the current practice of rapid software evolution, where the need for new functionality is addressed by a software upgrade. As a consequence, assurance arguments often lag behind, leading to delays in implementing new capabilities. Hence, there is a clear need for the rapid re-analysis and re-evaluation of the assurance arguments. This paper argues that assurance arguments are a special kind of software documentation that need to be tightly integrated with the implementation, and their construction and managed evolution are critical to the safety and performance of software-integrated systems.