In safety-critical engineering domains, engineering processes guide developers toward producing systems that adhere to stringent standards of safety and quality, while also allowing for the inherent flexibility of creative tasks. Process compliance focuses on ensuring that the engineering work-as manifested in the creation, tracking, and tracing of engineering artifacts-follows the described processes as closely as possible. The sequence of process steps is typically described using temporal process constraints over engineering artifact metadata (e.g., a requirement must transition from ‘draft’ to ‘ready for review’). Existing approaches, however, lack support for checking temporal constraints during development and rely on manual checks, resulting in delayed feedback when deviations occur. In this paper, we present an automated, incremental constraint checking approach that can evaluate temporal constraints across inter-related artifacts upon every artifact change, enabling timely feedback on process deviations. Our approach includes an incremental checking mechanism for temporal process constraints, and the ability to dynamically evaluate and integrate the history of artifacts as they become relevant for the constraints. Temporal constraints are expressed in the Object Constraint Language (OCL) extended with operators from Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). We demonstrate the ability of our approach to support a wide range of higher-level temporal patterns. We show that for constraints in an industry-derived use case, we can detect a significant number of temporal process constraint violations, some remaining unfulfilled after the end of the development process. We also find that, in this use case, the average evaluation for a single constraint operator takes around 0.3 milliseconds.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the challenge of automating process‐centric quality assurance (QA) in safety‐critical domains, where compliance with regulations is crucial. Currently, QA engineers manually check compliance using tedious methods like browsing engineering artifacts and ad‐hoc scripts. Automated support could improve efficiency, but it requires constraints to be written in structured, executable forms (e.g., in the Object Constraint Language, OCL), whereas engineers prefer natural language. To bridge this gap, we propose the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate OCL from natural language, enhanced by schema‐based prompting and domain‐specific language (DSL)–based repairs. Unlike prior work focused on UML models, this work applies OCL to software process QA. Evaluating six LLMs, we find o1‐mini and Codestral perform best, with our automatic repairs ensuring constraint executability for 22%–44% of an LLM's generated OCL constraints that would otherwise remain nonexecutable due to errors.

practice to create software-intensive systems in several domains (e.g., aerospace, automotive, and robotics). However, when multiple engineers work concurrently, keeping all model artifacts synchronized and consistent is difficult. This is even harder when the engineering process relies on a myriad of tools and domains (e.g., mechanic, electronic, and software). Existing work tries to solve this issue from different perspectives, such as using trace links between different artifacts or computing change propagation paths. However, these solutions mainly provide additional information to engineers, still requiring manual work for propagating changes. Yet, most modeling tools are limited regarding the traceability between different domains, while also lacking the efficiency and granularity required during the development of software-intensive systems. Motivated by these limitations, in this work, we present a solution based on what we call "reactive links", which are highly granular trace links that propagate change between property values across models in different domains, managed in different tools. Differently from traditional "passive links", reactive links automatically propagate changes when engineers modify models, assuring the synchronization and consistency of the artifacts. The feasibility, performance, and flexibility of our solution were evaluated in three practical scenarios, from two partner organizations. Our solution is able to resolve all cases in which change propagation among models were required. We observed a great improvement of efficiency when compared to the same propagation if done manually. The contribution of this work is to enhance the engineering of software-intensive systems by reducing the burden of manually keeping models synchronized and avoiding inconsistencies that potentially can originate from collaborative engineering in a variety of tool from different domains.

Software engineering organizations in safety-critical domains require rigorous processes that include explicit software quality assurance measures (QA) to achieve high-quality and safe engineering artifacts. One major challenge for engineers is adhering to the correct process that is applicable in their specific working context, to understand which steps are ready to start, what actions are missing to complete their step, and when rework has happened. In this paper, we propose and evaluate ProGuide, a framework that provides actionable, light-weight process guidance by continuously assessing pre-conditions, post-conditions, and QA constraints. In case of a violation, it provides concrete repair actions. Evaluation on a safety-critical open source system and engineers from our industry partner Bosch showed that repairs are complete and small in number, and resulted in less frustration and fewer mistakes compared to being provided with no process guidance. Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.

Along the process of engineering a safety-critical system, software engineers produce various artifacts, ranging from requirements and change requests to source code and test cases. In order to aid the development of the system and to adhere to the complex safety regulations and standards in place, engineers are often required to maintain bidirectional and consistent traceability between the produced artifacts. However, such artifacts are rarely maintained in one single tool. Because of that, the cross-tool bidirectional traces have to frequently be manually maintained, which can easily become a very time-consuming or infeasible task. Through interviews and observations at our industry partners in regulated domains, we observed that a number of different strategies are used to deal with this challenge. The use of naming conventions, querying, or URL links is observed in the industry. However, they have their shortcomings and hinder engineers from realizing the full potential that traceability can offer. Knowing the challenges in the industry, we explored existing literature. A range of approaches in the literature aims at dealing with traceability, but often they are context-specific and not easily transferable into practice. Given this gap between the state-of-the-art and industry needs, we performed interviews with our industry partners and analyzed tertiary studies from the literature to obtain a better understanding of what traceability properties are needed to unleash the potential of traces. We identified properties that represent the shared challenges between the related work and the industry requirements: discoverability, type checks, flexibility, navigability, and extensibility. While each property is addressed by a subset of the available solutions, we propose a novel traceability approach to support all of them in a single tool.

As the engineering world moves towards collaborative model-driven development, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep all model artifacts synchronized and consistent across a myriad of tools and domains. The existing literature proposes a variety of solutions, from passive trace links to computing change propagation paths. However, these solutions require manual propagation and the use of a limited set of tools, while also lacking the efficiency and granularity required during the development of complex systems. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a solution based on reactive propagation links between property values across multi-domain models managed in different tools. As opposed to the traditional passive links, the propagation links automatically react to changes during engineering to assure the synchronization and consistency of the models. The feasibility and performance of our solution were evaluated in two practical scenarios. We identified a set of change propagation cases, all of which could be resolved using our solution, while also rendering a great improvement in terms of efficiency as compared to manual propagation. The contribution of our solution to the state of the practice is to enhance the engineering process by reducing the burden of manually keeping models synchronized, eliminating inconsistencies that can be originated in artifacts managed in a variety of tool from different domains.