Deciphering the main research themes of software validation - A bibliographical study

Abstract

Software validation is an important issue since software is embedded in various devices and these devices are ubiquitous in our daily life nowadays. Software validation is an attempt to ensure the software product fulfills its specific intended purpose. As software is getting more complex, the software validation process is getting more complicated and time consuming. The study of software validation is an important active research field with voluminous publications. The sheer volume of software validation related literatures hinders our comprehending of its content and context. We therefore utilize the intellectual structure construction and knowledge domain visualization techniques developed by the information scientist to ease the task of understanding the main themes of this important research domain. Base on our analysis, we can see the research themes of software validation may be divided into three main groups: the first one deals with systems with interweaving hardware and software related issues, such as real-time systems, parallel systems; the second one deals with model checking related issues, including automata theory and temporal logic; the third one deals the modeling and simulation of concurrent and distributed systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.