Article
Sep 1 '10
Published
in Avionics Intelligence by Charlotte Adams
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.
Article
Aug 24 '10
A thread on the SoftTalk blog discusses Ada and multicore programming along with other Ada topics in the comments section.
Article
Aug 17 '10
Published
in Design Talk by John Greenland
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.
Article
Jun 6 '10
Published
in EE Times by Julien Happich
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.
Article
Apr 7 '10
Published
in Embedded.com by Yannick Moy
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.
Article
Apr 6 '10
Published
in EE Times by Mark Pitchford
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.
Article
Feb 16 '10
Published
in Embedded Computing Design by Tucker Taft
Static analysis tools are becoming more integrated into the software development process. Saving data from the compiler, change history, and error information during the process instead of as a post-code step can make static analysis more productive.
Article
Feb 15 '10
Published
in Embedded.com by Jack Ganssle
Jack Ganssle at Embedded.com discusses the Sofcheck and AdaCore CodePeer tool in Executing software contracts; in particular he examines the tool’s ability to create contracts for subprograms.
Article
Dec 7 '09
Published
in Electronic Design by William Wong
William Wong looks at the Dasher project being developed by Mälardalen University in Sweden.
Article
Sep 23 '09
Published
in Electronics Talk
LDRA has released a security-critical development and certification solution to ensure the company’s tool suite meets the growing demand for security-critical software.
