Ada Resource Association

Static and dynamic code analysis can improve application performance, safety and reliability by identifying problems early in the development cycle if the proper tools and procedures are used from the start. Dr. Mike Hennell, founder of LDRA, spoke with me about the various aspects of these types of tools.

Software engineers who specialize in mission-critical applications are gearing up for the release of an update to DO-178B safety-critical software certification standard in the form of DO-178C, which accommodates modern software engineering technologies such as formal methods and object-oriented programming.

AdaCore’s GNAT Ada development environment and Altran Praxis’ SPARK tools are being used at Vermont Technical College during the implementation of two NASA-sponsored programs: continued work on a CubeSat and development of an Arctic Sea Ice Buoy.

With the geometric growth in software size and complexity, avionics manufacturers are losing control of project schedules and budgets. Consequently, the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) hopes to address software development challenges through DO-178C – a new standard that embraces contemporary technologies and methodologies necessary to achieve these aims.

After five years, RTCA and EUROCAE, the U.S. and European avionics standards organizations, are nearing the finish line in updating DO-178B, the bible for developers of safety-critical software. A cast of 1,000-plus people have observed or participated in the process and about 100 people show up at every meeting, according to one member of RTCA Special Committee 205 (SC-205). The industry expects the final package — DO-178C — to be released in the first quarter of 2011 and be mandated six to nine months after ratification.

A thread on the SoftTalk blog discusses Ada and multicore programming along with other Ada topics in the comments section.

Zero Defect Software Development (ZDSD) is a results-oriented process that emphasizes the analysis, testing and reporting of the causality of defects. This process, which has evolved from the commitment to providing “five-nines” (99.999%) reliability for mission-critical applications, supplants the traditional approach of reacting to undesirable effects and treating symptoms while attempting to manage verification processes using “trend analyses” or simply tracking the occurrences of defects.

Altran Praxis announced that its SPARK language has been selected by a new, NASA-funded US lunar mission. SPARK will be used to develop the software behind a CubeSat project being developed by a consortium comprising Vermont Technical College, Norwich University, St. Michael’s College, and the University of Vermont.

The ease with which code is analyzable depends of the language type you use. Static analysis is becoming mainstream, with mature bug-finding tools for C and Java, including products such as Coverity Prevent, Grammatech CodeSonar, and Fortify SCA. These products limit the level of “noise” (false warnings) inherent to such tools to a minimum. However, by carefully selecting those cases for which they report a problem, these bug-finders hide the fact that they are largely uncertain about the overall correctness of the program.

Unit Test has been around almost as long as software development itself. It just makes sense to take each application building block, build it in isolation, and execute it with test data to make sure that it does just what it should do without any confusing input from the remainder of the application. In the past, the sting came from not being able to simply lift a software unit from its development environment, compile and run it let alone supply it with test data.