Posted by John Keller

BOSTON, 28 Sept. 2011. Two major software design and development tools companies are joining forces to provide an integrated environment that offers independent verification and traceability of software artifacts involving requirements, model elements, or tests through the software to help systems designers meet the requirements of software standards such as DO-178B/C, IEC 62304, ISO 26262, IEC 61508.

LDRA Ltd. headquartered in Monks Ferry, England, with U.S. operations in San Bruno, Calif., is teaming with The MathWorks in Natick, Mass., to combine the LDRA tool suite with Simulink modeling tools to assist in software standards compliance. The companies made the announcement this week at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston.

While model-driven development speeds application development, industry standards are clarifying their call for independent verification of the model-generated code, company officials say. The LDRA-MathWorks integration enables Simulink developers to access the capabilities of the LDRA tool suite from within Simulink.

LDRA and MathWorks also have integrated testing capabilities to reuse Simulink unit tests in the LDRA tool suite. LDRA’s TBeXtreme provides automatic test case generation from source code analysis. Together, Simulink and the LDRA tool suite build instrumented code using the selected compiler and executed via the LDRA tool suite.

The LDRA tool suite covers code from statement, branch or decision, linear code sequence and jump (LCSAJ), or modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) of code created from Simulink models and hand-written code.

For more information contact LDRA online at www.ldra.com, or The MathWorks at www.mathworks.com.

Related stories

-- LDRA delivers assembler level support for MIPS processors, enabling DO-178B certification;

-- Requirements to object-code traceability tool for avionics software released by LDRA; and

-- MathWorks unveils Simulink Code Inspector, strengthening support for DO-178 certification.