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The ability to find defects during testing is directly related to the test environment. There is a spectrum of test environments ranging from integrated high-level test environments that give a high-fidelity simulation of the real world to unit test environment that are not close to the real world environment.
High-level blackbox test environments provide the inputs and outputs that are available externally from the component under test. This provides high-fidelity, but does not give the flexibility and granularity to easily control all paths and conditions in the software. They are executed in real-time, but do not provide the ability to pause execution to modify the inputs conditions. Last, the available outputs provide limited ability to determine the state of the software and the detailed results of any given input sequence.
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The state of Software Engineering practice is now quite mature. As an industry, we know how to reliably develop software that meets its requirements. However, there still exists a wide gap between best practices and the practices that are in use to develop safety-critical systems; including airborne software. The causes of this gap are many- training, knowledge that is lost as new personnel are used, budget & schedule pressures, and misuse of tools.
The purpose of this forum is to share one DO-178 Practitioner’s experiences to help advance the state of the industry. I have seen many good policies and practices and I have seen many poor practices. This forum is also a place to discuss cutting edge issues, such as multicore processors, where current policy is still being developed.
My hope is to share my experiences to help all software development organizations learn to correctly comply with DO-178 and related best practices for safety-critical software.
Greg Turgeon has been developing safety-critical software since 1985. His experience includes software for factory automation and test systems, automotive systems, the International Space Station, and aircraft systems.
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