Blog

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.

Missed Embedded World? No problem!

Now in its 18th year, Embedded World is the leading international exhibition and conference for embedded systems. It attracts more than 30,000 trade visitors to meet and learn from over 1,000 exhibitors and speakers from across the world. The conference program covers the entire spectrum of embedded systems, with topics ranging from distributed intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) to e-mobility, energy efficiency and systems security.

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.

C means nothing on its own

We live in a world where our safety increasingly depends on software. It has now become so deeply ingrained in many aspects of modern life that, quite literally at times, we can’t live without it. This reflects three broad, converging industry trends: increased software complexity, greater software dependency, and growing demand for fast, accurate, safety critical performance from software.

The question for organizations that produce goods that depend on software is how do you manage these trends in a cost-effective yet responsible way?

The story of how BUGSENG came to be has taken many twists and turns over the years. From a teenage boy playing with his friend’s programmable calculator, through stints with the military and CERN and on to a glittering academic career spanning both Italy and Yorkshire, England. We wanted to find out more about this story, and who better to tell it than BUGSENG’s co-founder and CTO, Roberto Bagnara.

Q: What inspired you to set up BUGSENG?

In our previous blogs, we looked at the complexities of MISRA C compliance and the need for both robust verification tools and adequate personnel training. Organizations that start new projects having fulfilled these requirements will typically be able to claim MISRA compliance at the end of the project.

But there are exceptions, especially connected to the use of existing code. In this blog we’ll look at four situations, which can occur at the same time. The first two are rather common and all four can be the source of significant extra complications.