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…
The problems encountered within the AirBus 400M program highlight the importance of deploying an effective infrastructure when developing high-integrity systems. The core of DO-178 is indeed really about:
the quality of artifacts (how good is a requirement/algorithm/test/etc.?)
the quality of relations between artifacts (can I justify the existence of an artifact by tracing it to other artifacts?)
the evidence a well-defined process has been followed (was I faithful to my plan?)
The major issue within DO-178 is thus to provide evidence of the points above at a reasonable cost.
The DO-178 standard enforces a requirement-driven process with a focus on verification activities: the connection with Test-Driven Development is thus evident, as explained in the Open-DO Concepts and Ideas.
So far, I’ve seen two major experiments to support lean and agile DO-178 certification/qualification.
The first is through the use of complete tools such as OSEE. OSEE is able to track each user activity along with the artifacts it involves: it is “basically” an Application Lifecycle Management System integrated with an Action Tracking System, an Automated Testing Framework, a Requirement Management System and advanced Version Control System. Evidence of the quality of artifacts and of their mutual relations is provided by checking that appropriate verification activities have been performed; on the other side, evidence that a given plan has been followed is provided by analyzing the flow of tracked actions against a user-defined workflow. OSEE has been extensively used at Boeing for the Apache Program.
An alternative approach can be applied for more lightweight processes, for example the qualification of a verification tool. We have been using an hacked version of FitNesse (a web-based tool for acceptance testing) to support:
requirements, test cases and (unit) tests management;
tracking of verification and quality assurance activities when needed.
We are able to track verification and quality assurance activities for each atomic artifact and we use our Version Control System to check that artifacts are modified following a precise order (a verification activity for a given artifact shall take place after the editing of the same artifact). This lightweight approach is effective, but so far we have applied it just for the qualification of verification tools.
Applying lean and agile methodologies to DO-178 certification/qualification requires investing on tools – but the reward is well worth the cost. What is your experience with this? Which tools do you use? Comments are welcome!