Appendix 2: Glossary

Acceptance Testing       Formal testing conducted to determine whether or not a system satisfies
                         its acceptance criteria and to enable the customer to determine whether or
                         not to accept the system (IEEE 610:1991)
Analytical Model         A formal model based on the use of mathematical equations
Baseline                 A specification or product that has been formally reviewed and agreed
                         upon, that thereafter serves as the basis for further development, and that
                         can be changed only through formal change control procedures (IEEE
                         610:1991)
Capability Evaluation    The process of comparing the capability of an organization with a set of
                         criteria...in order to identify, analyze and quantify strengths, weaknesses
                         and particularly, risks. Capability evaluation has a major use in
                         procurement in the selection of suppliers, but it also has a use internally
                         within an organization (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7 N944R).
Certification            The act of having your quality system assessed by an independent,
                         accredited third-party for the purpose of confirming its conformance to a
                         series of standards and attesting to it in writing (ISO)
Causal Analysis          The process of studying the symptoms of a problem and determining their
                         cause(s)
Co-Engineering           The engineering and management activities, techniques and processes
                         that facilitate the co-development of subsystems of a different nature e.g.,
                         electronic hardware, mechanical hardware, silicon, software, user
                         documentation, and training material
Component                One of the parts that make up a system;  a component may be hardware
                         or software and may be subdivided into other components (IEEE
                         610:1991)
Concurrent               The engineering and management activities, techniques and processes
Engineering              that minimize the development time and schedule (cycle-time) of a
                         product;  this is achieved through an optimization of the concurrency in the
                         performance of product development tasks (e.g. specifications, design,
                         code), and minimization of inter-organizational/functional communication
                         through multifunctional teams.
Configuration Item       An entity within a configuration that satisfies an end use function and that
                         can be uniquely identified at a given reference point (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7
                         Vocabulary, 1993)
Contractual              All items having to do with the contract, e.g., the requirements, warranties,
Information              return procedures and purchase orders, as well as the contract itself
Customer                 Helping analyze and solve customer\qs problems and analyzing the
Support/Partnership      performance of the product
Development              All activities performed to create/enhance a product
Development              The tools and methods directly involved in the development of a
Environment              product, as well as the office and laboratory working environments
Documentation            Any written or pictorial information describing, defining, specifying,
                         reporting, or certifying activities, requirements, procedures or results
Engineering Technical    Any required tasks in support of the development effort
Activities
Fault                    The state of an item characterized by its inability to perform a required
                         function, excluding the inability during preventive maintenance or other
                         planned actions, or due to lack of external sources (Mellor:1993)
Failure Mode and         A qualitative method of reliability analysis which involves a fault modes
Effect Criticality       and effects analysis, together with a consideration of the probability of
Analysis                 their occurrence and a ranking of the seriousness of the faults
(FMECA)                  (Mellor:1993)
Fault Tree Analysis      An analysis to determine which fault modes of the sub-items or external
                         events, or combinations thereof, may result in a stated fault mode of the
                         item, presented in the form of a fault tree (Mellor:1993)
Formal Notation          The use of structured formatting within product development
                         documentation, e.g., design documents
Formal Review            A formal meeting at which a product or document is presented to the user,
                         customer, or other interested parties for comment and approval;  it can be
                         a review of the management and technical progress of the
                         hardware/software development project
Function                 1 : In management, a major activity or group of activities that are
                         continuous. For example, the principle functions of management are:
                         planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling
                         2 : In project management: an activity or set of activities that span the
                         entire duration of a software project. Examples of project functions include
                         configuration management, quality assurance, and project cost
                         accounting
                         3 : In programming: a specific, identifiable task performed by one or more
                         software components
Groupware                Software supporting cooperative development
Intermediate Product     An item which is produced during some phase of the software
                         development process, and is an input product to a later phase, but is not
                         provided to the user;  examples of intermediate products are requirements
                         specification, design specification, and test report (Mellor:1993).
Item                     Any part, component, device, subsystem, functional unit, equipment or
                         system that can be individually considered;  an item may consist of
                         hardware, software or both, and may also in particular cases, include
                         people (Mellor:1993)
I/O Class                Input/Output (I/O) access to/from a computer-based system is often
                         provided to a range of different I/O devices, having different speeds (e.g.
                         300 baud, 9600 baud, T1), supporting different character sets or protocols
                         (e.g., ASCII, EBCDIC, asynchronous, Facsimile, SONET), or differing in
                         other characteristics (e.g., line-oriented vs. screen-oriented display,
                         TrueType and PostScript character and page description languages).
                         Devices are thus classed by systems to which they are connected,
                         according to such distinguishing features. This simplifies the
                         implementation of the device driving software.
I/O Distribution         Input/Output (I/O) access to/from a computer-based system is often
                         controlled by that system by spreading the load across various
                         components or subsystems, such as controllers, or communications lines.
                         I/O is also often handled according to characteristics of the various I/O
                         devices. These classifications (I/O Classes) and load sharing activities
                         provide techniques for distributing the I/O load to/from the computer-
                         based system.
Life-Cycle Cost          The overall cost of a product, from the time it was conceived to the time it
                         was no longer available for use
Markov Modelling         A discrete, stochastic model in which the probability that the model is in a
                         given state at a certain time depends only on the value of the immediately
                         preceding state (IEEE 610:1991).
Organization             A company, corporation, firm, enterprise or institution, or part thereof,
                         whether incorporated or not, public or private, that has its own functions
                         and administration (ISO 8402:1991)
                         In the Trillium context, an assessment is generally applied to a
                         complete organization, or part thereof, that is responsible for the
                         development of a specific product.
Operational Profile      Consists of the function environmental conditions and probability of
                         executing the function in a given condition for a new product development
Operational Testing      Generic term which means either beta testing, field trial or VO (verification
                         office) testing
Prime Contractor         An individual, partnership, corporation, or association that administers a
                         subcontract to design, develop, and/or manufacture, one or more
                         products.
Process                  A set of interrelated resources and activities which transform inputs into
                         outputs;  resources may include personnel, facilities, equipment,
                         technology and methodology (ISO 8402:1991).
Process Assessment       The disciplined examination of the processes used by an organization to
                         determine the capability of those processes to perform within quality, costs
                         and schedule goals;  the aim is to characterize current practices,
                         identifying strengths and weaknesses and the ability of the process to
                         control or avoid significant causes of poor quality, cost and schedule
                         performance (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7 N944R)
Process Assets           Process-related documentation previously developed by projects in the
                         organization
Process Performance      A calculated measurement of the efficiency of a process
Process Repository       A library of documented processes
Product                  The result of activities or processes. A product may include service,
                         hardware, processed materials, software, or combination thereof (ISO
                         8402:1991)
                         In the Trillium context, the customer perceives the product as a
                         black box entity provided by the supplier. The customer sees only
                         the interfaces which provide access to the product operation. Gen
                         erally the customer has no view of the internal components inside
                         the black box.
Proof of Correctness     The construction of a mathematical proof that an output product of a given
                         phase is a correct implementation of an input product;  this requires that
                         the input product be written in a formal language, employing mathematical
                         set theoretic notation to describe each required function, and defining its
                         preconditions and postconditions (Mellor:1991).
Quality Management       All activities of the overall management function that determine the quality
                         policy, objectives and responsibilities and implement them by means such
                         as quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality
                         improvement, within the quality system. Quality management is the
                         responsibility of all levels of management but must be driven by top
                         management and its implementation involves all members of the
                         organization.
Quality Function         An overall concept that provides a means of translating customer
Deployment               requirements into the appropriate technical requirements for each stage of
                         product development and production
Reliability Block        A graphically represented mathematical model of the system based on the
Diagram                  functions and interfaces of the hardware at all levels
Reliability Engineering  Collection of tools used to determine the probability that a system or
                         component will operate without failure for a specified period of time in a
                         specific environment
Reliability Growth       Graphical or pictorial representation of predicted reliability
Model
Requirements             An essential set of conditions that a system has to satisfy (ISO 2382-
                         20:1991)
Software                 A set of programs, associated data, procedures, rules, documentation,
                         and materials concerned with the development, use, operation, and
                         maintenance of a computer system (CSA Q396:1989)
                         In the Trillium context, this includes firmware regardless of its final
                         manufactured form (e.g., PROM, Gate Array).
Specification            A document that specifies, in a complete, precise, verifiable manner, the
                         requirements, design, behavior, or other characteristics of a service,
                         product, system or component, and, often, the procedures for determining
                         whether these provisions have been satisfied (IEEE 610:1991)
Stochastic               Pertaining to a process, model, or variable whose outcome, result, or
                         value depends on chance  (IEEE 610:1991)
Stochastic Petri-net     A model used to represent systems with concurrency or parallelism,
                         extended for performance analysis with time as a random variable
Strength-Stress          The evaluation of a product based on the strength of the parts versus
Analysis                 expected stress placed on the respective parts of the product
System                   A collection of components organized to accomplish a specific function or
                         set of functions (IEEE 610:1991)
Systems Engineering      The application of the mathematical and physical sciences to develop
                         systems that utilize economically the materials and forces of nature for the
                         benefit of mankind
System Failure           The event of an item not providing its full required service. A failure is an
                         event in time. A fault is a state of the system. A failure may be due to
                         physical failure of a hardware component, to activation of a latent design
                         fault, or to an external failure. Following a failure, an item may recover and
                         resume its required service after a break, partially recover and continue to
                         provide some of its required functions (fail degraded) or it may remain
                         down (complete failure) until repaired (Mellor:1993).
System Testing           Testing software under conditions that simulate, to the extent possible,
                         typical installation environments
Target Computer          Same as target machine(software): the computer on which a program is
Resources                intended to execute (IEEE 610:1991)
Testing Acceleration     Incremental value of environmental stress to show product weakness in
Factor                   the shortest time period
Testing Compression      The ratio of execution time required in the operational phase to execution
Factor                   time required in the test phase to cover all the possible input states of a
                         program
Traceability             The ability to trace the history, application or location of an entity (e.g.,
                         product, activity, process, organization, person) by means of recorded
                         identifications
Usability Engineering    The engineering and management activities, techniques and processes
                         that optimizes the usability of a product (e.g., minimization of user training,
                         minimization of potential operator errors, optimization of time needed to
                         perform the most used functions)
User (end user)          The individual or group who will use the system for its intended operational
                         use when it is deployed in its environment (SEI)
Validation               The process of evaluating a system or components during or at the end of
                         the development process to determine whether it satisfies specified
                         requirements (IEEE 610:1991)
Verification             The process of determining whether or not the product(s) of a given phase
                         of the software development cycle fulfils the requirements established
                         during the previous phase (IEEE 610:1991)
Verification &       The process of determining whether the requirements for a system or
Validation               component are complete and correct, the products of each development
                         phase fulfil the requirements or conditions imposed by the previous phase,
                         and the final system or component complies with the specified
                         requirements (IEEE 610:1991)

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