SACM2 — Assurance Cases under development or Incomplete

SACM standard must accommodate assurance cases under development as this is expected to be a common usage ­ transferring assurance cases among their developers or maintainers. This includes those incomplete.

In addition to incompleteness, decisions may yet to be concerning option options including the type of certain relations ­ e.g. does an inference relation challenge or not. As the relative distinctions are not always known, particularly early in assurance cases construction, which currently abstract classes should be concrete classes should be reviewed and changed as required to accommodate this.

Recording explicit options yet to be decided among (and optionally their effects) could be useful (and also relevant to patterns).

More elements similar in name to the UnknownSubject might be included if required to meet this need.

Addressed by harmonization to create SACM 2.0.

Incomplete models, as always, can be exchanged. In addition, SACM 2 has added a new attribute to the base ModelElement class called isAbstract. This allows any part of an SACM model to marked as a placeholder for later instantiation according to optionally provided ImplementationConstraints. Status / lifecycle information about whether a modelElement is, for example, ‘Agreed / Confirmed / Rejected’, could be added to any model element (if required) using TaggedValue (which could use a community consensus vocabulary established using the Terminology package).