ERTS 2012 to feature Open-DO session on open source tools for software certification.

The sixth edition targets all the domains where embedded systems are crucial including (transportation - aeronautics, automotive, railway, subway and marine), satellite and space exploration, energy, telecommunications and wireless connectivity, e-healthcare, home automation, defence, industrial control. The Open-DO Initiative Open-DO (as in "Open" and "DO-178C" the forthcoming revision of the avionics standard for airborne software) is an open source initiative with the following goals: - Address the "big-freeze" problem of safety-critical software when certification evidences need to be produced (Avionics, Railway, Automotive, industrial automation, nuclear, military, ...); - Encourage community-based development and maintenance of qualification material for tools and certification material for reusable software components; - Decrease the barrier of entry for the development of safety-critical software; - Encourage research in the area of safety-critical software development; - Increase the availability of educational material for the development of safety-critical software in particular for academics and their students; - Foster cross-fertilization between open-source and safety-critical software communities. Continuous and Incremental Certification The essence of safety-critical software development is that all activities and their by-products come with evidence (sometimes formal, often informal) that proper due diligence has been undertaken in the production and verification of such software. As a result, safety-critical software comes with a large body of artifacts which can be orders of magnitude more voluminous than the software product itself. When a safety-critical application and accompanying evidence is complete, evolutions to the software often become costly because these entail regenerating the entire evidence-set. Consequently, when a piece of software receives the "certifiable" stamp subsequent changes are avoided: this is what we call the "big freeze". By leveraging on lean approaches and agility we aim, within the Open-DO initiative, to shift the focus of safety-critical software development to more continuous and incremental certification approaches. Qualifiable Open Source Tools and Certifiable Components Existing standards for developing safety-critical software assist developers in applying good software practices during development, focusing on adequate definition and execution of software engineering processes and activities: planning, requirements, design, code generation, verification, validation, integration, configuration management, quality assurance... Many of the activities in these processes are supported by tools. Developing community-based open source tools and components along with their qualification material decreases their cost of creation and support by virtue of sharing and reuse, and increases the chances of having adequate life-spans and evolutionary cycles. Below are a selection of current open-source projects on the Open-DO forge: - Couverture (coverage analysis toolset) - P (framework for model-based analysis and code generation from heterogeneous models) - GNATPython (a python framework to ease development of test suites) - HiberSource System (organizes the Software Configuration Management process according to DO-178B) - Hi-Lite (facilitates static verification of properties for high-integrity software) - Qualifying Machine (an integrated tool to automate the production of DO-178 qualification evidence) - Riposte (counter example generator for SPARK) - XReq for DO178B (a complete tool to bring together HLT and LLT and their requirements) Because software is not just its sources, we must learn to share and jointly evolve the qualification and certification material of the tools and components that will be part of Open-DO. As such, cross fertilization between open source and safety-critical software communities is an important pillar of the Open-DO initiative, and an important objective of Open-DO is to create a framework to federate open- source tools and components for safety-critical software development. Making Safety-Critical Software Development Accessible Decreasing the barrier of entry for the creation of safety-critical software is another important objective of Open-DO. In addition to the availability of open-source tools and components an important element of Open-DO is the availability of examples of processes and workflows along with document templates relating to various safety-critical standards, realistic sample projects complete with certification evidence, as well as courses and lab materials available to everyone. Joining the Open-DO Initiative Open-DO is an initiative; it requires the participation of players from industry, academia, and open-source communities. To be part of the initiative visit: www.open-do.org.