Increasing Development Assurance for System and Software Development with Validation and Verification Using ASSERT™

System design continues to trend toward increasing complexity as more functionality is added to aviation systems and the level of automation is increased. Since exhaustive validation and verification of this functionality becomes increasingly difficult, reliance on development assurance is needed to provide confidence that errors in requirements, design and implementation have been identified and corrected. To address this need for increased development assurance, GE is introducing a tool called ASSERT™ (Analysis of Semantic Specifications and Efficient generation of Requirements-based Tests). The system developer uses this tool to capture requirements in an unambiguous way with built-in semantic error checking. The requirements analysis engine is then used to assist in requirements validation to identify common problems which may include requirements that conflict with one another, requirements that do not fully specify the behavior of a function, requirements that are not independent of one another, and requirements that are either always true or false. Having unambiguous and complete requirements also enables the tool to consistently generate a complete set of requirements-based test cases and procedures to ensure the implemented product performs its intended functions and only the intended functions. This paper will detail how the ASSERT™ tool assists the system developer in performing validation and verification to increase development assurance on an example representative aerospace product beyond what a system developer could traditionally do on their own.