IEEE effort to standardize requirements capture language

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.
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DO-178C explained

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.
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DO-178C Upcoming Guidance for OOS

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.
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Open-DO Forge launched

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.
  • IP217 Information Model for reqs/design whose purpose is to develop and present a fully explained, detailed, exampled and documented version of the IP217 information model for requirements and design and verification.
  • 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!

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    Lean Principles in Open Source (Roberto di Cosmo)

    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…

    Read More »
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    The mystery of IP 217 revealed

    Several of you have asked what IP 217 refers to. Below is a description of the Issue Paper supplied by Dewi Daniels from Silver Atena and DO-178C committee participant:

    A number of presentations on Open-DO, including “Open-DO: a call to action” posted to the Open-DO web site, have mentioned something called IP 217 and several people have asked, “What is IP 217?”. Well, IP 217 was an (infamous) Issue Paper produced as part of the DO-178C/ED-12C standardisation effort.

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    Open DO slides

    Open DO: A call for action.ppt

    As some of you have difficulties accessing slideshare, I am posting the slides directly to the site as well. Enjoy!

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    Create and Maintain Scrum Documentation Effectively (Alexandre Boutin)

    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…

    Read More »
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    Open source and certified systems

    Carlo Daffara has sent through this interesting post that looks at the myth that Open Source software isn’t appropriate for building systems that require certification…Thanks Carlo!

    The popular idea that open source, as a collaboratively developed system, does not have the intrinsic quality or reliability to be part of life critical system is quite common. As an example a recent white paper, published by the Election Technology Council (an industry trade association representing providers for over 90% of the voting systems used in the United States), analyses the potential role of open source software in voting systems, and claims that the inherent process that creates OSS is unable to meet the quality standard necessary for a system that must meet strict certifications. Read More »
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    Interesting open-source partitioning kernel

    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.
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