Enhanced automation will help to streamline compliance by providing the infrastructure for transparent and auditable development workflows necessary in industries such as automotive (ISO 26262), medical devices (IEC 62304), industrial controls (IEC 61508), nuclear energy (IEC 60880), and aerospace (DO-178) and defence (DEF-STN 00-55). Such infrastructure is now essential in these industries, where connected devices and mobile applications are introducing security and safety vulnerabilities.
Using the LDRA tool suite, software teams will now be able to track requirements changes and quickly determine their impact on the design, code, and testing processes so as to eliminate problems, slow-downs, and the cost overruns typical of manual review processes.
The tool suite simplifies the creation and visibility of development and testing evidence for review by regulatory authorities. In addition, lifecycle transparency and automation enables simple and quick review of processes and artifacts during all phases of development.
Beyond the traceability automation, the tool suite also simplifies the construction of safer and more secure code by enabling adherence to coding standards such as MISRA, CERT, and CWE. Using the tool suite, software teams can automatically check their code against these standards and quickly address any reported coding standards violations. In addition, development teams can construct their own coding standards and check for adherence automatically. All such checks can be run automatically through the management capability. This saves development teams time and money while also ensuring that the code is safer and more secure by construction.
The LDRA tool suite also automates the process of generating and executing the test cases, test harnesses, and test stubs required to properly test the software components at both system and unit levels.
All of this testing capability is also managed and automated from the requirements; so when a requirement changes, the tool suite will be able to automatically determine which code needs to be retested and properly invokes all subsequent testing automation and analysis results accordingly. In large part, this can be a nearly hands-off approach for the software development and testing teams, who need only be involved at the development level to resolve any violations or errors identified by the tool suite. This level of automation is truly unique and empirically saves time and money.
“Software teams across all safety-critical industries are devoting significant amounts of resources in both time and money to prove compliance with their respective industry standards,” said Ian Hennell, Operations Director, LDRA. “When done manually, the process of proving compliance has been time consuming, tedious, and prone to error. The level of compliance that we now offer in the LDRA tool suite sets up the infrastructure so developers can easily see the workflow, track requirements changes, and quickly determine which tests need to be run. The result is a nearly pain-free process that gets them to compliance faster for less money.”
The LDRA tool suite: Aggregates requirements data from many sources, including various ALM and requirements management tools such as DOORS, DOORS NG, Polarion, Word, and Excel; links processes bidirectionally from requirements to code, to test cases, and test results; speeds impact analysis of any changes whether at requirements, code, or test case level; automates the execution of test cases (static analysis, unit tests, system tests); enables regression testing from the command line and captures data and automatically generates reports to demonstrate compliance