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, Franco Gasperoni presents and positions requirement-based testing and coverage analysis in terms of the Avionics standard DO-178B. He then goes on to show how the Open-DO initiative (through Project Coverage) is addressing these needs.
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.
I attended the DASIA 2009 conference las week, and I discovered a really nice open-source initiative targeting the high-integrity real-time community. The Real-Time Systems Group of the University of Valencia has developed an open-source hypervisor (partitioning kernel) called XtratuM, which is not ARINC compliant, but it provides temporal and spatial partitioning. It currently works on x86 and LEON2.
I know personally the people behind this project, and I can encourage you to keep an eye on it.
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!
Albatross is the Open Source ATM community according to founders Skysoft-ATM. The vision is to tackle vendor lock-in and offer “easier access to technology to small and medium size airports and centers in emerging markets.”
One of the projects they (currently 39 members) are working on is the Albatross Display which is described as a “open source Air Traffic Controller environment to provide a full Controller Working Position.” with the first release planned for the end of this month (June 2009). The certified version of the project is planned for Q4 2009.
An interesting article was published in Defense News concerning recent issues encountered when certifying the software that drives the TP400 engine used on the A400M military transport plane:
“The problem came from having to demonstrate to the European Aviation Safety Authority traceability through the development cycles.”
Here’s the third in a series of videos shot at the recent “Lean, Agile Approach to High-Integrity Software” Event. In this talk, Emmanuel Chenu, software development coach at Thales Avionics, shares his experiences working with Agile development methods. Each week we will post a new talk from this event. Enjoy!
(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 4 parts.
Part 1 of 4To view parts 2-4 of this talk click the ‘Read More’ link just below… Read More »
Here’s the second in a series of videos shot at the recent “Lean, Agile Approach to High-Integrity Software” Event. In this talk, Jim Sutton, author of Lean Software Strategies and winner of the 2007 Shingo Prize presents a contrast and comparison of Lean and Agile methods. Each week we will post a new talk from this event. Enjoy!
(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 5 parts. You can also download the presentation slides if you want to follow along.
Part 1 of 5 To view parts 2-5 of this talk click the ‘Read More’ link just below… Read More »
As promised, here’s the first in a series of videos shot at the recent “Lean, Agile Approach to High-Integrity Software”. We start with Cyrille Comar from AdaCore presenting the concepts around the Open-DO initiative. Each week we will post a new talk from this event. Enjoy!
(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 5 parts. You can also download the presentation slides if you want to follow along.
Part 1 of 5To view parts 2-5 of this talk click the ‘Read More’ link just below… Read More »