Three big BUGSENG announcements

We’ve been busy at BUGSENG recently and are now delighted to be able to share three exciting news stories.

Launch: ECLAIR Qualification Kits

This month we launched our ECLAIR Qualification Kits for the qualification of ECLAIR according to functional safety standards. These are the culmination of three years of intensive research, development and learning by the BUGSENG team. But, the results are worth it; they will save development, Quality Assurance, and functional safety teams an enormous amount of time and money.

The responsibility for proving that verification tools are qualified, and can be used safely in the context of the specific project, rests entirely on the end user of the tool. You must be able to provide this evidence to the external (third party) authorities that are certifying the safety critical system containing your device.

Qualifying a verification tool, such as ECLAIR, involves producing thousands of validated tests covering each aspect of the used system functionality and lots of quite involved documentation to convince the third party that the tool is behaving in the way it should. And, you must be able to prove that the tool works in your own environment, on your project and with your computer configurations. You must also be able to repeat all tests in your environment, in a way that allows the third party to validate the tests.

Here’s a high-level overview of our ECLAIR Qualification Kits. You can download the full brochure here.

Saving significant time and money

Some tool qualification processes can be done entirely by the end user. But, it takes an enormous amount of resource. We estimate that it could take a functional safety engineer around a year to complete qualification properly, unless they were using an ECLAIR Qualification Kit.

Our kits contain documents, test suites, procedures and automation facilities that the customer can use to obtain all the confidence-building evidence required to make a solid argument justifying the use of ECLAIR in safety-related projects. Crucially, this includes a safety manual containing strict, precise prescriptions for the installation, verification and use of ECLAIR for the development of safety related systems. In addition, a test automation unit is provided that allows users, without effort, to reproduce the output of thousands of tests, and check that the output coincides with expectations. All that means tool qualification can be completed by a competent team in more like one to four weeks, depending on the functional safety standard and the use cases.

All the evidence and support you need

There are different ECLAIR Qualification Kits for each functional safety standard. For example, ISO 26262 for the automotive industry and RTCA DO-178C/DO-330 for the aerospace sector. And, we have a kit for all major MISRA coding standards.

With our kits, you can gather all the evidence you need to justify the use of ECLAIR for the implementation of language subsetting according to MISRA guidelines. The kit has been designed from the outset to support third-party checking: for instance, the test automation unit is supplied in source form and all tests have been designed so as to be easily reproducible even without this unit.

Other support services include template documents that you can easily integrate with test results. This gives users an efficient way to provide evidence, such as an overview of our ECLAIR development process, to substantiate safety claims and explain exactly how they used ECLAIR in the context of a specific project. We’re also committed to keeping customers up-to-date with defect reports and suitable workarounds. We’re happy to provide consultancy support and bespoke expert advice to help qualify the tool if required.

Remember, you can download our full ECLAIR Qualification Kits brochure for more details. If you have any questions, you can contact us at qualification@bugseng.com.

Upcoming MISRA C events in Italy and India during November

Following the success of our workshop in Pisa in June, we are running another MISRA C workshop at the FIAT Research Center in Turin on 22 November. For this half-day session BUGSENG’S CTO, Roberto Bagnara, has joined forces with Alessandra Mitidieri Costanza, a FIAT engineer and automotive software development specialist. The workshop will cover the latest developments of the MISRA C standard and FCA requirements, and will include a practical demonstration.

You can find full details, including how to book, here. Please note that the workshop is free but you must pre-register.

Roberto is also giving a series of presentations on static analysis and MISRA C in partnership with Menlopark Technologies in India. The venues are Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai between 8 and 15 November. You can find full details and the registration link here.

Our competition winner is…

In our last blog, we gave details of our C programming competition. We received only one entry that fully conformed to all the rules, but it was a truly remarkable submission. Dr Andrew V. Jones, of Vector GB Limited, submitted a C function whose source code is only 671 characters, yet it may return 147,456 different values (i.e., almost 200 times more than the example given in the paper cited in our previous blog) depending on the compilation options (GCC/x86 64, version 8 or later, use of the -D, -U and similar options forbidden).

Congratulations to Andrew: he wins a 180-day ECLAIR license instantiated over the package "MISRA C:2012 + Bug Finder + HIS metrics".

Roberto Bagnara, Ph.D is CTO of BUGSENG, a leading provider of solutions and services for static code analysis. He is also a member of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 - C Standardization Working Group and the MISRA C Working Group.