LDRA integrates leading requirements engineering tool IRQA into LDRA tool suite

DESIGN West 2012, SAN JOSE, USA: LDRA, the leader in standards compliance, automated software verification, source code analysis and test tools, announced the integration of Visure Solutions’ IRQA requirements engineering tools with TBmanager, a test management and traceability component within the LDRA tool suite.

The strong integration of the products will ease regulatory compliance by providing transparent, end-to-end traceability from system requirements to verification and validation for safety- and mission-critical software.

The unified workflow throughout embedded software development shortens build cycles by establishing high-quality requirements that then link to code and test artifacts. Clear traceability ensures code is written to specifications created from the system design, reducing rework and increasing software robustness.

Process-oriented standards, such as DO-178C and ISO 26262, mandate that all source code and validation tests be traceable to requirements. This mandate ensures that the embedded software fulfills all requirements, operates correctly, and has no extraneous code not associated with a requirement. Many companies use manual methods with tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel to trace requirements to code. But as embedded software becomes more complex, the challenge of demonstrating traceability makes these tedious, error-prone manual methods―and even some legacy requirements tools―increasingly unworkable.

“By automating software development from requirements through the various stages of product development, engineering teams save months of development time while creating a more reliable, easy-to-maintain final product,” said Ian Hennell, LDRA’s Operations director. “Although the LDRA tool suite is requirements-tool agnostic, the IRQA solution is well suited to companies that are newly implementing requirements or that want a different requirements tool option. Such companies can take advantage of IRQA requirement quality metrics and achieve end-to-end traceability throughout their software development lifecycle.”

“With the growing complexity and criticality of software, companies can no longer afford to manage requirements manually,” confirmed Baldo Rincon, CEO of Visure Solutions. “With this tight integration of the LDRA tool suite and IRQA, developers can integrate requirements engineering technology into a single, transparent workflow that takes a project from conception through implementation to validation. Not only does this give project managers more confidence in the quality of the code, but it also ensures that certification can be achieved on schedule and within budget.”

By integrating Visure Solutions’ requirements engineering solution, IRQA, into LDRA’s TBmanager, system designers can now specify clear, precise requirements that improve the quality of the entire software project. Because IRQA includes a requirements analyzer, each requirement is given a quality rating that enables developers to avoid weaknesses such as ambiguous words, conditional sentences, poor structure, implementation suggestions, overlapping requirements, inconsistent use of units, and legibility.

Through integration, these well-specified requirements are linked to related source code and tests, which TBmanager graphically represents. Development teams, even when geographically dispersed, have an immediate visual understanding of the complex, hierarchical matrix underpinning the software under development. Such insight ensures software can be managed efficiently and dramatically reduces development time.

LDRA’s standard-specific templates for DO-178C, ISO 26262, IEC 61508 and IEC 62304 detail both certification and programming requirements, creating checklists and identifying tasks needed for certification compliance. The requirements-to-test traceability walks through these certification steps, speeding the iterative software development cycle of error identification, code correction, and test rerun.

Since testing is an essential part of code validation and verification, traceability to tests ensures that the code fulfills all requirements and is certification ready. The LDRA tool suite tracks the entire process, developing the documentation needed to prove compliance.