Category Archives: Certification

Challenges facing avionics software developers

In a recent article “Avionics software programmers challenged by integration, certification, testing issues for software-centric aircraft“, Barry Rosenberg from Avionics Magazine discusses the testing and certification processes used when building these systems.
Also posted in In the Press | Leave a comment

Certification Together Conference

According to the website, “The Certification Together International Conference for the Aeronautical Industry is the only event in Europe fully dedicated to System, Software and Hardware certification challenges.”

Looking at the program, a large part of it, as you’d expect, is dedicated to the changes in the upcoming DO-178C standard and how it will affect current certification process and practices. Coupled with these are more practical, hand-on user studies provided by primes and vendors alike.

Cyrille Comar will be giving a talk based around “The challenges of Agile certification” and an update on the Object Oriented Technology (OOT) supplement of DO-178C.

The event will be held in Toulouse, France – Oct 26-28.

Also posted in Agile/Lean Programming, Events, Related Initiatives | Leave a comment

Achieving Embedded Software Safety with Agility

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.”

To read the full article, please click here.

Also posted in Agile/Lean Programming, In the Press | Leave a comment

Couverture paper presented at ERTS² 2010

At the recent ERTS² 2010 conference held in Toulouse, Thomas Quinot presented a paper entitled

Object and Source Coverage for Critical Appl ications with the Couverture Open Analysis Framework“.

It presents the Couverture approach to object and structural coverage analysis for certified safety-critical applications, in particular in the context of DO-178.

Also posted in Agile/Lean Programming, Papers and Slides | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

XReq Project

XReq – Executable Requirements for DO-178B – is the latest project to join the Open-DO initiative. XReq, first contributed by Sogilis, is a tool designed to help testing and verifying a project. It has been specifically adapted for the DO-178B context but can be used by a much wider audience. To help DO-178B projects, it bring together the tests (HLT/LLT) with their requirements, thus helping traceability of the tests.

For further information, please visit the XReq project page.

Also posted in Open-DO News | Leave a comment

ERTS² conference week

I spent a very interesting week in Toulouse last week. It started with a day of conference in which INRIA research labs showed a host of products and advanced research applicable to the domains of modeling and safety. There was in particular demos of Astrée (static analyzer for C, now sold by AbsInt Gmbh), Frama-C (framework for analyses on C, partner in Hi-Lite) and Alt-Ergo (prover SMT, partner in Hi-Lite).

It continued with the conference ERTS² during 3 days, which gathered many French and European providers and customers of embedded solutions. I’d like to highlight 3 presentations:

Also posted in Events, Open-DO News | 1 Comment

Hi-Lite project officially launched

Yesterday saw the official launch of the Hi-Lite project. Financially supported by French national and local government agencies, Hi-Lite aims to increase the use of formal methods in developing high integrity software, particularly to meet the forthcoming DO-178C avionics standard.

Hi-Lite is completely based on libre software. The project is structured in two different toolchains for Ada and C based on GNAT/GCC compilers, the SPARK verification toolset and the Frama-C platform. The integration of these toolchains inside two industrial IDEs offers to the user a common interaction on Ada and C programs. In particular, mixed Ada/C programs can be verified against a common specification.

The project partners are AdaCore, Altran Praxis, Astrium Space Transportation, CEA-LIST, the ProVal team of INRIA and Thales Communications. AdaCore is the project leader. For more information please visit www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite and to subscribe to the public mailing list please send email to hi-lite-discuss@lists.forge.open-do.org.

We will be reporting on its progress here as it reaches major milestones throughout the evolution of the project.

Also posted in Open Source, Related Initiatives | Leave a comment

Embarquez Agile workshop

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.

More details can be found here.

Also posted in Agile/Lean Programming, Events | Leave a comment

DO-178: Couverture and the “Source Code VS Object Code Coverage” debate

Couverture is a qualifiable tool to measure structural coverage. This paper describes how the Couverture technology copes with the “Souce Code VS Object Code Coverage” debate in a DO-178 context.

The Couverture project is hosted on the Open-DO Forge.

The attached paper is also published in the Ada User Journal, December 2009 issue.
Also posted in Papers and Slides | Leave a comment

HiberSource project joins Open-DO

We are pleased to welcome the HiberSource project to Open-DO. This configuration management system is used to manage project data in accordance with DO-178B and supports the full software life cycle.

There are many free version control systems (such as SVN) but there are no free configuration systems to support projects (like Razor or PVCS). HiberSource was started to be a configuration system to support full software life cycle with developing, verification and other certification activities.

For more information, please visit the project on the Open-DO forge.

Also posted in Open Source, Open-DO News | Leave a comment
  • Categories

  • Open-DO Projects

  • Want to get involved?

  • Contact