In this recently published article in Embedded Technology, Jose Ruiz looks at how Agile methods can be successfully applied when building safety-critical embedded software. He concludes:
“Production of safety-critical systems is typically expensive and not conducive to changes. Agile techniques can help increase the level of automation in production and certification, increasing adaptability to changing requirements and reducing delivery time and cost. These methods are based on iterative and incremental development, verified by continuous and automated tests. This notion can be extended to all certification artifacts to achieve continuous certification.”
It presents the Couverture approach to object and structural coverage analysis for certified safety-critical applications, in particular in the context of DO-178.
The next talk in our series from the recent Open-DO Conference is from Dr. Peter Gardner. Peter has twenty years experience in languages and software development methodologies and acts as the focal point for UML in Silver Atena. His talk surveys Agile methods and formulates a list of features that occur in these methods, then considers whether each of the features can be applied in the field of safety-critical software development.
You can also view the presentation slides if you want to follow along.
Embarquez Agile (Embed Agility) is a one day conference being organized by AeroSpace Valley competitive cluster. The event will take place in Bordeaux, France on March 18, 2010. Cyrille Comar and Matteo Bordin will be giving talks around the Open-DO initiative and the notion of Qualifying Machine.
Following the inaugural event last year, the 2nd International Workshop on Formal Methods and Agile Methods is taking place in Pisa, Italy, September 17 2010.
According to the website, “the aim of this workshop is to seek and to discuss novel ideas about combining FM and AM in the domain of software development, with the goal of making formally sound development methods faster, and rapid methods of development more formally sound. This goal could be approached in various different ways, for example by providing tool support to an ‘agile’ software development group, or by adopting ‘agile’ practices such as pair work into the domain of formal modelling.”
A Qualifying Machine (QM) is an agile and lean infrastructure to ease DO-178 tool qualification. The main goal of a QM is to ease the manipulation of all artifacts within the whole application life cycle and to track the activities performed by the development team.
Within Open-DO, we released an instantiation of the QM concept for GNATcheck, a coding standard checking tool qualifiable for DO-178. The infrastructure and qualification material (including the Tool Qualification
Plan and the testing framework) are freely available as open source in the Open-DO forge. With this initiative, we intend to promote open collaborations in the high-assurance domain and to show how to deploy a lean and agile
qualification process.
You can get more information on the Open-DO Qualifying Machine and download its instantiation for GNATcheck here.
Speaking at the Ada UK Conference 2009 in London, Jim Sutton presents a talk on a Lean approach to one of the most import aspects of starting any development project: selecting the right programing language.
Last week I attented the Grenoble (October 20, 2009) and Valence (October 22, 2009) conferences as part of the Agile Tour 2009 series. These events were a big success and attracted more than 450 attendees! I would like to thank one more time the CARA who did a very good job at organizing these.
The presentations were of very high quality and their diversity pleased practionners as well as managers and students. All the slides are accessible on the CARA’s website (French and English).
I gave a talk in Grenoble and Valence about the infrastructure and processes we put in place at AdaCore to build and test on a daily basis all our compilation chains and accompanying technology in a Lean fashion.
I also presented the “qualification machine” we have built based on open source technology to ease the DO-178B tool qualification process by adopting an agile philosophy.
Here’s the fifth in a series of videos shot at the recent “Lean, Agile Approach to High-Integrity Software” Event. In this talk, Alexandre Boutin, Lean & Agile Coach at Yahoo! presents his uniquely Agile approach to creating and maintaining documentation.
(Viewing tip: click the ‘HQ’ button on the video controller for better image quality, it helps a lot for the slides)
The talk is presented here is 3 parts.
Part 1 of 3
To view parts 2-3 of this talk click the ‘Read More’ link just below…