MicroSTAMP: Microservices for Steps 1 and 2 of the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) Technique

STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis) is a technique that aids safety analysts in the development of hazard analyses for socio-technical systems. Although safety analysts are usually interested in a complete hazard analysis, by performing the four steps of the STPA, artifacts produced in each of the steps can be independently valued by other stakeholders, such as domain experts, systems engineers, software developers and system designers. There exist some software solutions to support STPA, but none of them are developed focusing on reuse of the implementations of each of the four STPA steps, in isolation, between different tools. This work has two objectives: (i) to create MicroSTAMP, a set of two microservices that partially supports the STPA technique (steps 1 and 2) and (ii) to demonstrate that it is possible to reuse the microservices, by integrating MicroSTAMP with other tools to fully support STPA (steps 1–4). This work presents the two MicroSTAMP microservices to support STPA steps 1 and 2 and demonstrate that it is possible to integrate MicroSTAMP with a second tool (WebSTAMP) in order to provide full support for the four steps of STPA. We named PowerSTAMP the result of the integration of MicroSTAMP with WebSTAMP. We conclude that MicroSTAMP benefits several stakeholders, from those who are interested in the results of specific steps of the STPA (steps 1 and 2) to those who need a complete hazard analysis, by applying the four steps of the STPA technique.