Avionics software requires absolute safety and reliability. In order to ensure that air-certified software is of the highest quality, the RTCA has created strict standards for software quality. These standards require organizations to prove that the software and safety requirements are met and fully tested. For over 30 years, Parasoft has been helping organizations follow such standards through required best practices like unit testing, full test coverage, software metrics, and static code analysis.
Software compliance for aircraft starts with software engineering standards and best practices. Added to these are anything beyond normal that would be required specifically for aircraft certification. Parasoft C/C++test is an integrated toolkit for C and C++ development and test that supports a broad range of these best practices that are proven to improve software safety and reliability.
Parasoft C/C++test automates C and C++ static analysis and unit/component testing on host and target with comprehensive code coverage supporting multiple levels of DO-178B/C. Included in static analysis is built-in support for all the popular standards used in aviation software like MISRA C and JSF AV C++.
DO-178 requires you to qualify test automation tools as outlined in DO-330. This means tests, data, and documentation that support the proper installation, configuration, and operation of the chosen tool. Parasoft products belong to the ‘Software verification tools’ category of DO-178 guidance because the output cannot introduce any errors into the software to be certified.
Parasoft streamlines the tool qualification process with a qualification kit that contains everything you need to easily qualify Parasoft C/C++test as a verification tool. Learn more about it here.
In short, the kit contains all the documentation, templates, tests and reports you need to qualify C/C++test. There is a GUI driven tool that lets you select which components you’re using so as to shorten the verification process if you’re only using some of the C/C++test functionality. The selected components create a specific test suite and executes it, then compares it with the expected outputs and produces necessary documentation for your tool qualification process.
The Joint Strike Fighter Air Vehicle C++ Coding Standards was originally produced by Lockheed Martin in order to address concerns about the safety of C++ in-flight systems. To help guide developers to avoid risky code, the standard was originally built on top of MISRA, altered to incorporate C++ features and the more stringent requirements of aircraft.
Parasoft has worked directly with Lockheed to implement the guidelines listed in the standard as rules that can be scanned using static analysis. Parasoft C/C++test comes with an out-of-the-box configuration for JSF coding standards, and can measure the software against specific thresholds.
The JSF guidelines require knowing and understanding issues like code complexity, cohesion, and coupling. In Parasoft C/C++test, these types of issues are implemented as static analysis rules that both gather data and have configurable thresholds for determining what values are allowed for each metric. Static analysis and dataflow analysis allow developers to improve the accuracy and consistency of the code – removing risky coding issues such as stack errors, overflow, dead code, exception handling, and uninitialized variables — and creating safe, secure, reliable software that aircraft rely on, as required by JSV AV C++.
With today's aerospace and defense systems becoming more intelligent and interconnected, an individual component can no longer be looked at in isolation because it is part of a bigger system-of-systems, with onboard devices no longer just gathering data but also performing autonomous actions and communicating back to the bigger system in the cloud. This increases the complexity of testing as well as the test environment, while simultaneously increasing the surface area for potential security attacks.
Parasoft provides the technologies needed to help organizations overcome these challenges, addressing testing both through the messaging interface (API testing via Parasoft SOAtest) and by directly testing the internel embedded code with unit testing (via Parasoft C/C++test). Simulate different conditions in the test environment using code-level test doubles, and at the protocol level using service virtualization (via Parasoft Virtualize).
"Parasoft’s solution has been fully deployed across SELEX for many years now. In fact, SELEX’s software quality became so impressive that their sub-suppliers and partners started to wonder how the developers were able to such strides. After SELEX’s associates learned the secret to SELEX’s striking quality achievements, they began deploying Parasoft products in their own organizations."
— SELEX
"When we compare defect rates in the component before and after adopting Parasoft’s static analysis, we find that we are now achieving 30% fewer defects...If other suppliers would provide the type of support that we’ve had from Parasoft, the world would be perfect. The support we have received from Parasoft has been truly remarkable."
— Thales
— Development Engineer, Trane
