An Empirical Evaluation about Using Models to Improve Preliminary Safety Analysis

<p>Video presentation of the paper &quot;<em>An Empirical Evaluation about Using Models to Improve Preliminary Safety Analysis</em>&quot; to appear at <strong>II Workshop de Modelagem e Simula&ccedil;&atilde;o de sistemas intensivos em Software (II MSSiS) </strong>2020 co-located with CBSOFT 2020.</p> <p><strong>Abstract.</strong> <strong>Context</strong>: Safety analysis is an activity of fundamental importance in the development of safety-critical systems (SCS) to ensure that hazardous situations are properly found and mitigated. Such analysis is performed after a system requirements specification is available. Therefore, it is then worthwhile to investigate specification techniques to detect their strengths and weaknesses with respect to discovering hazards early in the development process. <strong>Objective</strong>: In this paper, we investigate similarities and differences in the results of a preliminary safety analysis from requirements specified using models in Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Textual Use Cases (TUC). <strong>Method</strong>: We adopted a controlled experiment as research method using computer engineering students as subjects. <strong>Results</strong>: The subjects of BPMN group found more accidents, hazards as well as more causes of hazards. Moreover, they have a higher preference for the template used for safety analysis documentation. <strong>Conclusions</strong>: The use of BPMN to represent the interactions among actors in a system probably lead to the discovery of more accidents and hazards, but more experiments are necessary to test this hypothesis since the results are not statistically significant.</p>