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.

“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.

Chosen excerpts: “embedding of contracts as code is a better approach”; “The language of conditions is just the language of expressions in the programming language used”; “ForAll and Exists that work over integer ranges and collections”; “Any methods called from within contract expressions should be pure methods”; “Runtime contract checking is particularly effective in conjunction with automated testing”; “generating good documentation from the embedded contracts is a key scenario”.

And the conclusion: “Since contract expressions are compiled by the existing compiler, the typical problem of having the specications and the code drift apart due to edits, refactoring, etc., is avoided.”

All of this supports the vision of project Hi-Lite, and provides valuable experience reports which should inspire us in Hi-Lite.

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

For further information, please visit the XReq project page.

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:

• the Formal Methods Subgroup of the upcoming DO-178C standard presented how formal methods may be used in a certification context
• PolySpace and automotive stakeholders presented the use of static analysis tools to ensure levels of quality from subcontractors
• the initiative “Certification Together” presented the goals of their initiative to share the cost of certification

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.

You can also view the presentation slides if you want to follow along.