tags: Monthly Community Meetings

2023-04-13 Eiffel monthly community meeting: Expressing a confidence level for combinations of SW and HW

Attendees

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Topic

We have SW that can be run on multiple types of HW. This means a SW can pass tests on one HW but fail on another and we would like to express this with confidence levels. The legal targets (subject link) for the ConfidenceLevelModified event don't seem well suited to describe HW (CompositionDefined probably being the best option).

Discussion

After a long discussion we concluded this proposed way forward:

  • No change to the CLM event is neede
  • The CD event should be ok to use as a definition of a hardware type, where data.name would describe that hardware type. Such CD events might not have any ELEMENT links in them, since we don't yet have a good idea on how to declare "hardware artifacts". The documentation for the CD event should be updated to describe that can be used as a "hardware recipe"
  • When the Pull Request https://github.com/eiffel-community/eiffel/pull/322 is merged, we will have the event type ArtD (ArtifactDeployed) in the protocol, and a CLM event can link to that. Setting the SUBJECT link of a CLM to point to ArtD means that we have reached confidence on "an instance of a software artifact running on an environment (hardware instance)", while setting the SUBJECT link of a CLM to point to CD means that we have reached confidence on "a recipe containing software artifacts" or "a recipe containing sofware artifacts and a hardware type".
  • Ericsson today uses FlowContextDefined events to describe similar use cases, so this will introduce a migration need for Ericsson.
  • Next step would be to go home and discuss this proposal in our organizations, and verify it. The discussion could hopefully be concluded during the Eiffel Summit in June 2023.

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