Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering (CESE)
Announces Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA)
with
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Devices and Radiological Health
College Park, Maryland -- The Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, Office of Science and
Engineering Laboratories (FDA/CDRH/OSEL) has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Fraunhofer
Center for Experimental Software Engineering (CESE) to further research in the area of software engineering. The CRADA is a formal
legal instrument under which government and academic research is sanctioned.
For over 30 years, organizations have been trying to develop quality software systems based on the premise that quality development
processes deliver quality software. One of the major flaws in this premise is that there is always a difference between (abstract)
design specifications and (concrete) human crafted software / code. The saying among experts is that the code represents the final
specifications.
From a forensic perspective, design documentation is of limited use when a medical device fails due to a software error. A forensic
investigator must work with the code to identify a software error, and then through analysis understand its relationship to the design
specifications and system architecture.
The Software Architecture and Embedded Systems (SAES) division at CESE has, together with its sister institute Fraunhofer IESE in
Kaiserslautern Germany, been exploring this issue for several years resulting in a software tool called SAVE (Software Architecture
Visualization and Evaluation http://fc-md.umd.edu/save/ ). The tool facilitates reverse-engineering software
architecture statically
from files containing source code. SAVE does this by performing detailed static analysis to identify the dependencies
(imports, method call, inheritance) between code components and then uses component definitions supplied by the user to construct
the software architecture. This architecture may then be visualized by defining different levels of abstraction, with the tool
creating automatic links between the different abstraction levels to allow a user to navigate from high-level component-level
views down to the code-level. SAVE can be used for code comprehension and to detect deviations between the extracted architecture
and the "ideal" architecture, where the "ideal" is defined to be what the architecture ought to be.
According to Rance Cleaveland, PhD, Executive and Scientific Director of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software
Engineering, "This Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the Food and Drug Administration offers a tremendous
opportunity for synergistic research into improved safety for medical devices. We appreciate their commitment to us through
this arrangement, and we look forward to being a part of the team in this exciting and important endeavor."
Software Architecture and Embedded Systems (SAES) is a division within the Center for Experimental Software Engineering
at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. The non-profit applied research and technology transfer organization
is led by CEO Dr. Rance Cleaveland who is also a full Computer Science professor at University of Maryland College Park.
Further information is available through http://fc-md.umd.edu or by calling Dr. Arnab Ray, Scientist, at 240.487.2914.
The Vision
FC-MD envisions an ever
increasing need for both
technology and research
organizations to better
integrate their efforts to
understand software and
the impact that software has
in the world.
FC-MD strives to be a
recognized leader in this
endeavor among industry,
government, and academia.