Compiler warnings are useful, but they are highly unreliable. In addition, they are no substitute for language subsetting, as mandated by most functional safety standards and typically achieved by complying to the MISRA coding standards.

There is a popular quote in the software verification and validation community:

"Without a specification, a system cannot be right or wrong, it can only be surprising!"

(Paraphrased from W. D. Young, W. E. Boebert, and R. Y. Kain; "Proving a Computer System Secure", The Scientific Honeyweller 6(2), pp. 18-27, 1985.)

The European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) comes into force on 26 May 2021. While this is good news for public safety, it puts considerable extra pressure on medical device manufacturers. It also brings some new, perhaps not strictly medical, products into regulatory scope.

This month, the BUGSENG team is launching a raft of new services and support for developers, QA and safety teams. We’ve designed them in response to feedback from our customers about the continual challenges you face balancing safety with available resources, budgets and project deadlines. Our new ECLAIR 3.9.0 release has three valuable new features to help you.

Developing critical systems software in C saves time and money if you have proper language subsetting and compiler qualification.

Managing software development projects is a tough job. You’re constantly juggling resources, deadlines, budgets and risk. It’s like running a small city.

BUGSENG have been running MISRA C/C++ workshops, seminars and presentations across Europe and India in recent years. As a result, we’ve had several requests for some of this learning and expertise to be translated to a webinar format. We’re delighted to announce we’ve done just that and will be running the first five webinars from March to June.

Roberto Bagnara and Dr Patricia Hill of BUGSENG are currently working on a joint paper with Michael Barr, a leading embedded systems software engineer and consultant. The paper discusses the relationship between BARR-C: 2018 and MISRA C: 2012.  These are the two most widely used C coding standards and the paper details their parallel and serial adoption. 

When Lonely Planet asked travelers for their ‘lost in translation’ photos of signs and menus from around the world, they had over 1,000, often hilarious, responses. Even when communicating in natural languages and dialects, the potential for confusion is immense. We see a similar but more serious issue of confusion around the C programming language.