Safety Working Group meeting - requirements management tools discussion

Next Generation ROS
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After a brief hiatus, myself and a few others are making another go of the Safety Working Group.

This time we are going to be starting from a tasks point of view. Our first target is improving the use of and tracing of requirements, as this is a fairly fundamental part of building a safety-critical system.

The meeting will start at 2020-04-30T14:00:00Z and run for up to two hours, depending on how much discussion we have. See the ROS 2 events calendar for the meeting details, including the teleconference link (which is also reproduced below).

We will be having two talks followed by some discussion:

  • Mehul Sagar from Apex.AI will be talking about the tool chain they use to manage and trace their requirements from creation through implementation to test
  • Florian Friesdorf and Marko Durkovic will be talking about the tool they created for Apex.AI, called trice, that provides some simple requirements tracing and which can potentially be open-sourced.

Following these talks, we will discuss what we can do to bring trice to the ROS world as an open-source, simple requirements management tool. Our goal is to provide a base level of requirements tracing.

Please come along if you have interest in this topic, and especially if you want to help out!

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Meeting ID: 266 509 195

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Thank you to all who attended. We had a good number of attendees at last, and some interesting discussion. The meeting minutes are now available at the working group’s website.

Our next meeting will be in two weeks, at 2020-05-14T14:00:00Z. We will be discussing how we want to use a requirements tool and what work is necessary to get trice to this level.

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Thanks @gbiggs – this was a great meeting. As discussed, we put together an example repository at https://gitlab.com/MaplessAI/external/requirements-testing to outline some of the features we would expect from a requirements management tool. More details are captured in this issue. Happy to give an overview in our next meeting.

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I’d suggest not to use something like Rational DOORS. From experince I know that working with it is any other than fun. Biggest pain point is linking production source code to low level requirements, linking test code to low level tests, it’s based on a database which implies that you are limited to mostly text based requirement and test definitions. However in case people have to use these tools it would be great if the ROS2 solution would provide interfaces for integrating with them.

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I think I can say with 100% confidence that Rational is not on the table. Aside from the prohibitive cost for any of us working in the open source space (even if for a company), the complexity is ludicrous and the learning curve looks something like the EVE Online learning curve.

If the ability to integrate requirements tools together is desired, there are interchange formats that can do that but I haven’t used any of them directly myself.

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Awesome. :smile: I didn’t know the EVE Online Learning Curve. However there are laying around some fallen people w.r.t. Rational DOORS for sure.