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.
Last month I attended part of the Formal Methods Week 2009 in Eindhoven. Each year the FMWeek brings the world of formal verification together, with an emphasis on academic and industrial partnerships.
Although I am familiar with the field, I was still impressed by what is currently possible with tools based on formal methods. Although it will never
be 100% automated, you can already get very strong guarantees on industrial products with high levels of automation.
Two examples show it better:
Airbus presented their use of formal verification tools for DO-178B software. Five of the six tools that were presented are in use within operational units. This presentation echoed, 10 years later, the presentation they gave at FM 1999 about their first trial with formal verification. With a decade of experience in industrial use of such tools, they have defined 5 “must-have” criteria: soundness, applicability to the code, usability by “normal” engineers on “normal” computers, improve on classical methods, certifiability. Very important lessons indeed.
André Platzer from CMU presented his work on formal verification of flight collision avoidance maneuvers which won the best paper award. This is quite a leap in coverage of formal methods: verifying nonlinear properties involving curves, differential equations etc. with almost complete automation.
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.
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.
In a recent announcement, IEEE has approved work to develop a standard for a language to capture software requirements.
Unfortunately, I have not found much information about it. They mention that the information will be presented in a tree-like structure, which should fit well with the hierarchical organization of requirements in typical safety-critical development.
In a recent article in Avionics Intelligence, Cyrille Comar and others describe the upcoming DO-178C standard and the differences between it and the existing DO-178B one:
“Avionics software designers are quite familiar with the DO-178B certification process for flight software from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). However, current technology trends in software code development are requiring new verification and certification approaches, so industry and government experts are building a new certification called DO-178C to address these concerns.” To read the full article, please click here.
Cyrille Comar gave a talk at the recent SAFECOMP conference on the work being undertaken by the SC-205 and WG-71 working group on the upcoming DO-178C standard. He gives particular attention to the Tools Qualification Supplement, the OOT (Object-Oriented Technology) Supplement, and the Formal Methods Supplement.
Over the summer the Open-DO team has been busy working on putting in place the Open-DO Forge (collaborative platform) that will host all the current projects being developed. There are currently 3, with more planned:
Gene-Auto – a DO-178-qualifiable model compiler for synchronous modeling languages such as Simulink, StateFlow and Scicos.
Couverture – a coverage analysis toolset for safety-critical software projects undergoing a DO-178B software audit process for all levels of criticality.
Please visit these projects, join, and start contributing to them if they are of interest to you!
Here’s the sixth and last in a series of videos shot at the recent “Lean, Agile Approach to High-Integrity Software” Event. In this talk, Roberto di Cosmo, Professor of Computer Science at the Paris Diderot, presents his observations and research on the realities and challenges of building open-source communities.
(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 4
To view parts 2-4 of this talk click the ‘Read More’ link just below…
