Robust network design is the study of network design in the face of variable or uncertain demands. This layer covers a broad array of tasks that include requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, and maintenance phase of the. It also involves a standardized approach to program development, both in its managerial and technical aspects. Robustness can encompass many areas of computer science, such as robust programming, robust machine learning, and robust security network. Robust design method, also called the taguchi method, pioneered by dr. But it was always a comparative this is more robust than that etc. Sep 06, 2009 i studied engineering and we used the term robust in a more casual parlance when describing something that remains fit for purpose in the face of numerous engineering changes and within a wideranging tolerance. As you can see from the definition, robustness involves errors. This 2005 technical note provides guidance and procedures for performing robustness testing as part of dod or federal. Asked in software engineering what is robustness testing in. It means, for instance, handling incorrect user input, either malicious or erroneous, handling lack of re. Robustness is the ability of the closed loop system to be insensitive to component variations. Robustness is the ability of software to cope with errors during execution. Software testingcarnegie mellon university18849bdependable embedded systems spring1999 authors.
Robustness vs correctness competition software engineering. Definitions of the term robustness robust design quelle. Our goal is to dramatically increase the reliability and robustness of nasas mission related software, and the productivity of its software engineering, through the research, development, application, and transfer of automated software engineering technology that scales to meet nasas software challenges. Different levels of robustness may be defined depending on at which stage of software quality. Robustness has been defined by the food and drug administration as the degree to which a software system or component can function correctly in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Software quality may be defined as conformance to explicitly stated functional and performance requirements, explicitly documented development standards and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed software.
Introduction to software engineeringquality wikibooks. Reliability and robustness are two very different things. Robustness testing of autonomy software college of engineering. Applying the unix philosophys rule of composition i.
Ansi and ieee have defined robustness as the degree to which a system or component can function correctly in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Software reliability electrical and computer engineering. The term robustness testing was first used by the ballista project at carnegie mellon university. Robustness is the property of being strong and healthy in constitution. Genichi taguchi, greatly improves engineering productivity. Generally, robustness provides information on the relative flexibility of alternatives. Engineering for the enterprise is not a replacement for classical systems engineering. It defines an outline for a set of key process areas that must be acclaimed for effective delivery of software engineering technology. Hetzel88although crucial to software quality and widely deployed by programmers andtesters, software testing still remains. What is the definition of the robustness of a machine learning algorithm. For instance, what would be the main design considerations or what would be the definition of the terms when looking at engineering problems. Lets look at the various definitions of software engineering.
Software is robust if it can tolerate such problems as p unanticipated. In addition, a description of robust design or the robust design. Apr 20, 2020 black box robust testing in software testing. Robustness definition and meaning collins english dictionary. A report on a conference sponsored by the nato science committee, nato, 1969. A software is robust, if any exception raised during its execution, in any architecture and with any initial state, is caught by some exception handler. Software engineering stack exchange is a question and answer site for professionals, academics, and students working within the systems development life cycle. In this case, the codebase should be considered robust overall.
The overall goal of this thesis is to identify gaps in the knowledge and take steps towards improving and creating methods to work with software robustness. Robustness testing is any quality assurance methodology focused on testing the robustness of software. Definition of software engineering and software engineering. Systems engineering strategies for uncertainty and. The developer shall define and document test requirements and schedule for testing. Software design practices that aid bug discovery during the quality control stages which are performed more frequently and. International organization for standardization isointernational electrotechnical commission iec institute of electrical and electronics engineers ieee. Robustness definition of robustness by the free dictionary. Specific robustness tests for embedded realtime systems are not included in this report. The definition of robustness as a quality attribute the ability of an algorithm to continue operating despite abnormalities in input, calculations, and environment is taken from the ieee standard glossary of software engineering terminology radatz et al. To identify gaps in the state of knowledge, this thesis rst describes a sys. The definition of robust in mechanical engineering sciforums. When used to describe software or computer systems, robustcan describe one or more of several qualities.
In computer science, robustness is the ability of a computer system to cope with errors during execution12 and cope with erroneous input. On the other hand, you want to have correctness, which basically means the. A report on a conference sponsored by the nato science committee, nato 1970. Robustness is also what make it possible to design feedback system based on strongly simpli. Agreement of program code with specifications independence of the actual application of the software system. The authors define robust software as a software that works for people. Robustness testing of softwareintensive systems carnegie. On this page, the definitions of robustness and robust design, which can be found in the literature, are listed, see table 1. Robustness definition of robustness by medical dictionary. During several independent technical assessments itas, the carnegie mellon software engineering institute sei found that some programs were testing software to only the. The process layer allows the development of software on time. Different levels of robustness may be defined depending on at which stage of software quality checking most errors are surfaced. I believe it would best be understood with an example. One of the most important points to improve the robustness of our software is to test it.
The goal of the research group of the robust software engineering technical area is to dramatically increase the reliability and robustness of nasas mission related software, and the productivity of its software engineering, through the research, development, application, and transfer of automated software engineering technology that scales to meet nasas software challenges. Independence of the actual application of the software. The definition of this word is, the property of being strong and healthy in constitution. To get back to your precise example and take a look at the definition of the term robustness in wikipedia. Today, modern simulation software allows companies to also address stamping robustness issues during the earlier phases of product and tooling design. Robustness can also be defined as the ability of an algorithm to continue operating. Residual defects in the software or hardware will eventually cause the system to fail to correctly perform a required function or cause it to fail to meet one or more of its quality requirements e. It is one of the most useful properties of feedback.
Mar 30, 2017 abstraction is the act of representing essential features without including the background details or explanations. Nov 25, 2019 residual defects in the software or hardware will eventually cause the system to fail to correctly perform a required function or cause it to fail to meet one or more of its quality requirements e. Robustness testing of autonomy software icseseip 18, may 27june 3 2018, gothenburg, sweden the crash scale 26, focusing in particular on catastrophic, reset, and abort errors. In other words, companies can now develop the best product designs and the best tool designs for a robust stamping process. Ieee defines software design as both a process of defining, the architecture, components, interfaces, and other characteristics of a system or component and the result of that process. According to the ieee standard glossary of software engineering, robustness is the degree to which a system or component can function correctly in the. Since software reliability is one of the most important aspects of software quality, reliability engineering approaches are practiced in software field as well.
Software design is a phase in software engineering, in which a blueprint is developed to serve as a base for constructing the software system. Mesram a method for assessing robustness of measurement. In robustness testing, software is tested by giving invalid values as inputs. Nowadays, contracts already exist in nearly every kind of business. Robustness is the engineering equivalent of durability and robust or strong things are not easily destroyed because they are strong. Nov 09, 2015 in computer science, robustness is the ability of a computer system to cope with errors during execution. In the same line robustness can be defined as the ability of a system to resist change without adapting its initial stable. Here are a few links that discuss what it means to be robust in terms of software. Not only do we have to check the runtime and inputoutputbehaviour, also sideeffects should be discovered. A software is robust, if any exception raised during its execution, in any architecture and with any initial state, is caught by. The goal of robustness testing is to develop test cases and test environments where a systems robustness can be assessed. It should be noted that this last sense of the term robust is not uniformly accepted in technical circles. Correctness, reliability, adequacy, learnability, robustness, maintainability, readability, extensibility, testability, efficiency, portability. This technical note provides guidance and procedures.
Definition of robust the linux information project. Robustness analysis provides an approach to the structuring of problem situations in which uncertainty is high, and where decisions can or must be staged sequentially. In total, the ballista project tested 30 systems, including windows 95 through xp, as well as many posix. Assume that you have a product called the super cake. Software engineering is defined as a process of analyzing user requirements and then designing, building, and testing software application which will satisfy those requirements. Robustness is one such important quality attribute which is defined by the ieee standard glossary of software engineering terminology 1 as. One of the challenges of software quality is that everyone feels they understand it. Since these problems can and do occur in live operation, this session examines how to evaluate a systemthis session examines how to evaluate a system ss robustness within the relative sanctity of the test lab. Thus the robust measurement program is a program that continuous to operate. Robustness testing has also been used to describe the process of verifying the robustness i.
In robust boundary value testing, we make combinations in such a way that some of the invalid values are also tested as input. The robustness of any initial decision is the number of acceptable options at the planning horizon with which it is compatible, expressed as a ratio of the total number of acceptable options at the planning horizon single future. Information and translations of robustness in the most comprehensive dictionary definitions resource on the web. In robustness testing, the software is tested by giving invalid values as inputs.
I would assume that the question is about robustness of software. If you think there is one universally agreed upon definition of robust here, good luck. This article begins with a discussion of ecosystems and includes a large number of footnotes and references for the interested reader. Robustness is a systems ability to handle abnormal situations eif02. In computer science, robustness is the ability of a computer system to cope with errors during. According to the results, the research contributions in some development phases such as requirements engineering of software robustness are very limited. By consciously considering the noise factors environmental variation during the products usage, manufacturing variation, and component deterioration and the cost of failure in the field the robust design method helps ensure customer satisfaction.
Systems and software engineering system and software engineering vocabulary sevocab. The method layer provides technical knowledge for developing software. The specific focus of robustness analysis is on how the distinction between decisions and plans can be exploited to maintain flexibility. When it is transposed into a system, it refers to the ability of tolerating perturbations that might affect the systems functional body. The word robust, when used with regard to computer software, refers to. In computer science, robustness is the ability of a computer system to cope with errors during execution. Before defining the meaning of software robustness, some expressions will be defined to help explain the meaning of software robustness. This indicates that robustness has been a relevant topic in mechanical engineering for more than 30 years. Apr 27, 2020 software engineering is defined as a process of analyzing user requirements and then designing, building, and testing software application which will satisfy those requirements. Software testing is any activityaimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system anddetermining that it meets its required results. I studied engineering and we used the term robust in a more casual parlance when describing something that remains fit for purpose in the face of numerous engineering changes and within a wideranging tolerance.
Software engineering is a process of analyzing user requirements and then designing, building, and testing software application which will satisfy that requirements important reasons for using software engineering are. Robustness is defined as the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Every time when a company instructs another to produce some kind of hard software or just requests any kind of service, there will always be a certain contract which regulates the main points that have to be done. A proliferation of software reliability models have emerged as people try to understand the characteristics of how and why software fails, and try to quantify software reliability. There can be some synonyms like bombproof or idiotproof. I am trying to understand the difference in the definition of fault tolerance and robustness when it comes to system design. The main gap we identified was the lack of studies on elicitation and specification of robustness requirements. Since the existing number of definitions exceeds the scope of the work, only a direct description of the term robustness or the related adjective robust is treated as a definition. In the computer science and software engineering domain, the abstraction principle is used to reduce complexity and allow efficient design and implementation of complex software systems. Software engineering is a technological discipline that combines the concepts of computer science, economics, communication skills, and management science with the problemsolving approach of engineering. Increasingly, both disciplines must be used in combination to achieve success.