Qualifying Software Tools, a Systems Approach

Abstract

Abstract. Modern safety standards designed to ensure safety in embedded system products often take a descriptive approach, focusing on describing appropriate requirements on management, processes, methods and environments during development. While the qualification of software tools has been included in several such standards, how to handle the safety implications of tools integrated into tool chains has been largely ignored. This problem is aggravated by an increase both in automation of tool integration and the size of development environments.In this paper we define nine safety goals for tool chains and suggest a qualification method that takes a systems approach on certifying software tools as parts of tool chains. With this method, software tools are developed and pre-qualified under the assumption that certain properties will be supported by the development environment they are to be deployed in. The proposed method is intended to (1) achieve a stronger focus on the relevant parts of tool chains in regard to safety and (2) separate the extra effort these parts imply from the effort already stipulated by safety standards.

Towards the Automated Qualification of Tool Chain Design

“…We use an approach for tool chain qualification in four steps, namely (step 1) pre-qualification of engineering tools, (step 2) pre-qualification at the tool chain level, (step 3) qualification of the tool chain and (step 4) qualification at the tool level [5]. This approach lets us separate the parts required by modern safety standards in regard to software tool qualification from the extra effort suggested by us to identify safety issues related to tool integration.…”

“…If such a risk is identified, an associated safety goal [5] can be required to be fulfilled for that part of the tool chain. Such a safety goal will point to certain types of mitigating actions that need to be shown to be in place in later steps of our approach.…”

“…Existing standards deal with qualification and certification in different ways, as discussed in [5]. Some standards require tools to be suitable and of a certain quality [3], while some are stricter and require the development of relevant tools to fulfill the same objectives as the development of the products handled by the standard itself [12].…”

“…Together with (2) this leads to the conclusion that not only isolated tools, but also the integration of tool chains should be qualified [5]. However, as shown in [8], there is a reluctance of practitioners to use a one-size-fits-all solution for tool chains.…”

Quality assuring the quality assurance tool: applying safety-critical concepts to test framework development

“…Among the standards for functional safety, the transportation domain is often considered important with respect to tools used during development ( Asplund, 2014 ; Asplund, 2015 ; Asplund, El-khoury & Törngren, 2012 ; Conrad, Munier & Rauch, 2010 ; Ekman et al, 2014 ; Krauss, Rejzek & Hilbes, 2015 ; Notander, Höst & Runeson, 2013 ). IEC 61508:2010 (2010) is a generic industrial standard covering the lifecycle activities for systems in this domain.…”