Comparing Safety Analysis Based on Sequence Diagrams and Textual Use Cases

Abstract

Abstract. Safety is of growing importance for information systems due to increased integration with embedded systems. Discovering potential hazards as early as possible in the development is key to avoid costly redesign later. This implies that hazards should be identified based on the requirements, and it is then useful to compare various specification techniques to find out the strengths and weaknesses of each with respect to finding and documenting hazards. This paper reports on two experiments in hazards identification -one experiment based on textual use cases and one based on systems sequence diagrams. The comparison of the experimental results reveal that use cases are better for identifying hazards related to the operation of the system while system sequence diagrams are better for the identification of hazards related to the system itself. The combination of these two techniques is therefore likely to uncover more hazards than one technique alone.

Graphical vs. Tabular Notations for Risk Models: On the Role of Textual Labels and Complexity

“…In the literature we found three main streams of works that compares textual and visual notations: a) studies that proposed cognitive theories to explain the differences between the notations or to explain their relative strengths (Vessey 1991), b) studies that compared different notations from a conceptual point of view (Kaczmarek et al 2015;Saleh and El-Attar 2015), and c) studies that empirically compare graphical and textual representations, e.g., for safety and system requirements (Sharafi et al 2013;Stålhane and Sindre 2008;Stålhane et al 2010;Stålhane and Sindre 2014;de la Vara et al 2016), software architectures (Heijstek et al 2011), and business processes (Ottensooser et al 2012). To the best of our knowledge, there are few similar studies that empirically investigated modeling notations for security risk (Hogganvik and Stølen 2005;Grøndahl et al 2011) or compared graphical and tabular security methods in full scale application experiments (Massacci and Paci 2012;Labunets et al 2013Labunets et al , 2014.…”

“…Regarding the studies on comprehensibility in security domain, a series of controlled experiments were conducted by Stålhane et al (Stålhane and Sindre 2008;Stålhane et al 2010;Stålhane and Sindre 2014) to compare the effectiveness of textual and graphical notations in identifying safety hazards during security requirements analysis. They compared textual use cases with system sequence diagrams (Stålhane et al 2010;Stålhane and Sindre 2014) and misuse case diagrams with textual misuse cases (Stålhane and Sindre 2008).…”

“…They compared textual use cases with system sequence diagrams (Stålhane et al 2010;Stålhane and Sindre 2014) and misuse case diagrams with textual misuse cases (Stålhane and Sindre 2008). These studies showed that the textual representation helps the user to focus in the relevant areas and was more effective in identification of threats related to functionalities and user behavior, whilst diagrams were more effective for understanding system's internal working and identifying related threats.…”

HAZOP-based identification of events in use cases

“…As described in Section 2, H4U is part of a functional requirements elicitation, whereas the approaches presented by Srivatanakul et al (2004), and Allenby and Kelly (2001) are concerned with nonfunctional requirements. Analysis of use cases has also been studied by others (Alexander 2003;Stålhane and Sindre 2007;Stålhane et al 2010); however, they are not using HAZOP at all.…”

On the Equivalence Between Graphical and Tabular Representations for Security Risk Assessment

“…The results reported in [23] revealed that textual use cases helped to identify more threats than use-case diagrams. In more recent experiments [24,25,26], Stålhane et al compared textual misuse cases with UML system sequence diagrams. The results showed that textual misuse cases are better than sequence diagrams in identification of threats related to required functionality or user behavior.…”