Requirements as enablers for software assurance

The level of compliance with Certification and Accreditation (C&A) requirements conveys the level of assurance that one can expect from the quality of software behavior, Therefore, it is critical to understand the C&A requirements in terms of their applicability, scope, and impact of non-compliance on diverse aspects of software behavior to justify its certified qualities. However, numerous C&A requirements in ambiguous natural language descriptions with different levels of granularity are scattered across multiple documents that are used as guidance for C&A activities. As a result, a great deal of subjectivity is involved in understanding C&A requirements and their evaluation. This article discusses our approach to represent, model, and analyze C&A requirements to promote a common understanding among stakeholders for engineering more reliable software.