Since one single customer complaint can have many causes inside the product methods will be developed to allow non-intrusive data logging inside the products analyzed during this project. These trails will concentrate not only on the internal architecture of a system but especially on the parts of a system that interact with the outside world.

This is in contrast with the traditional tracing techniques; most traditional tracing techniques (also known as debugging) concentrate on finding deviations from the formal specification during execution. This sub-project will focus especially on finding discrepancies between customer requirements and specifications and therefore a stronger focus on the product interfaces is expected. The ambition is that these activities should lead to methods that generate SRP related data early in the product creation process and within the time constraints of modern industrial product creation processes.

Currently the focus is on the general theme of self-observing products and their possible usage in various scenarios. While engaging in the design and architectural aspects of such systems, a concern is also the implementation of several real-life cases and later on the generalization of requirements that might arise in the application areas of this technique. Thinking goes into the direction of an integrated development process by using UML-based tools as well as model transformation and weaving to achieve a seamless integration of the observation aspect which is in most cases cross-cutting through large parts of the host system. On the other hand this “from-scratch” approach cannot be applied to nowadays products and product development processes so it is important to find a way to smoothly introduce observation into already existing systems. Regarding this, industrial case studies will be done.