Medical Device Software Development Testing

For organizations focused on mitigating the risks of security threats in their medical devices, Parasoft C/C++test promotes secure coding patterns and helps users achieve compliance with security coding standards. Parasoft C/C++test’s support for security coding standards is the most comprehensive solution on the market with built-in checkers for verifying compliance with standards such as CERT C, CERT C++, UL 2900, CWE, and others. Dedicated compliance reporting makes it easy for stakeholders to understand risk management.

To reduce the cost of complying with coding standards, Parasoft’s dedicated reporting enables users with granular, dynamic views into the compliance process. Parasoft’s centralized reporting system helps users make sense of testing results by analyzing code violations according to the groupings and categorizations from the original standard.

Compliance documentation, which is a must for proving compliance, can be generated automatically. The generated reports and documentation complying with the MISRA 2020 standard, which is very popular across industries, saves teams valuable time while boosting performance.

Parasoft C/C++test static analysis tool detects complex runtime-like problems early in the development stage by analyzing execution paths through the code and finding potential bugs. In addition to 2200+ rules and checkers, Parasoft makes it easy for teams to verify organization-specific coding guidelines with a special editor for creating custom checkers to extend (or replace) the built-in rules provided with the tool. With Parasoft C/C++test, users don’t have to write any scripts, and organization-specific coding guidelines can be fully automated to replace the manual process of compliance verification.

Parasoft C/C++test’s convenient views and graphical editors reduce the manual effort of unit test case creation and maintenance with a unit testing framework designed with safety-critical software testing in mind. Stubs and test cases with values for tested software’s stimulation can be created as source code or with graphical editors with source code generation capabilities.

Users can store and review created test artifacts together with the project’s files. The initialization of the variables and input parameters for tested software stimulation is done in exactly the same way as during production software operation, making the method reliable and robust.

Unit testing is much easier and productive if used together with a stubbing and mocking framework. Parasoft C/C++test’s powerful module for creating stubs and mocks help in fault injection testing, reduce dependencies of the tested code, and enable users to easily stub out source code that hasn’t been implemented yet.

Parasoft C/C++test can be used to execute unit tests on the host platform, target processor simulator, or the embedded target. This flexibility enables developers to run tests frequently inside the IDE and in the CI/CD pipeline, where simulators are typically used with real hardware. Parasoft C/C++test’s testing harness was optimized to take minimal additional overhead for the binary footprint and processor cycles. Dedicated integrations with embedded IDEs and debuggers make the process of executing unit test cases smooth and automated.

Parasoft C/C++test displays code coverage results from all levels of testing, including unit, integration, and system. It supports all of the coverage metrics typically required when developing safety-critical software (statement, branch, MC/DC, function, call, path, simple condition, line, block, and more).

Parasoft users spend less time analyzing coverage results to find gaps in the testing process. Developers can review code coverage results inside IDE with dynamic views and filter the results depending on metric, function and method, or specific test case.

Parasoft integrates with the team’s requirements management system (RMS) to provide traceability reports that display the correlation between requirements and the following:

• Source code created to implement these requirements.
• Test cases created to test the requirements.
• Results of executed tests and code coverage.

Traceability reports provide clear and complete information about development progress. Teams can easily determine how many requirements were already implemented and how thoroughly they are tested.

Parasoft C/C++test is certified by TÜV SÜD as suitable for use when developing safety-critical software. For projects with a higher level of risk, Parasoft C/C++test’s qualification kit automates a significant part of the tool qualification process, reducing the amount of manual work and eliminating this distraction from software teams.

A dedicated qualification support tool guides users through all of the steps required to qualify the tool. It automates the majority of the tedious manual work required to qualify the tool, including executing the test cases from the exhaustive test suite provided and generating the final reports required to document the qualification process.