The Certification of Software Tools with respect to Software Standards

Software development standards such as the UML provide complex modeling languages for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems. Software tools support the production of these artifacts according to the model elements, relationships, well-formedness rules and semantics defined in the standards. Due to the complexities of both standards and software tools, it is difficult to establish the compliance of the software tools to the standards. It has been suggested that many existing tools that advertise standard compliance fail to lift up to their claims. The objective of this work is to propose a framework for developing systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable certification schemes to assess the compliance of these tools to standards and to diagnose the causes of non-compliance.