Major industries such as electric vehicles (EVs), Internet of Things (IoT), aeronautics, and railways have strict, well-established processes to ensure they can maintain high safety standards throughout their operations. This level of precision, compliance, and enforcement is particularly important for safety-critical industries such as avionics, energy, space and defense, where high emphasis is placed on the development and validation of embedded software that contemporary and newly developed vehicles and vessels rely on to ensure operational safety.
It’s rare for a software glitch on its own to cause a catastrophic event. However, as embedded software systems become more complex, so too does the onus on developers to make sure their software is able to operate within that complexity bug-free.
That’s because the increasing interconnectivity between multiple information systems has transformed the critical domains like medical devices, infrastructure, transportation, and nuclear engineering. Then there are issues like asset security, risk management, and security architecture that require safe and secure operation of equipment and systems. This necessity for safety is not only acute from operational safety perspectives, but also in terms of cybersecurity.
However, despite the application of rigorous testing processes and procedures that are already in place, subtle bugs are still missed by testing techniques that don’t provide full coverage and don’t embed themselves deeply within operational environments. They are unacceptable errors that cannot be allowed to remain undetected and potentially metastasize but finding them and rooting them out is still a major challenge for most.
While the software driving embedded compute systems becomes more complex and, therefore, more vulnerable, increasingly strict safety regulations designed to protect human lives are coming into force, which means that software development teams need to devise innovative solutions that enable them to proactively address safety and security issues. They should also be able to do so quickly to respond to demand without compromising test result integrity.
This need is particularly significant among critical software companies who depend heavily on traditional testing methods. Even when following highly focused, tried and true testing processes, there are for many software development engineers a nagging concern that a bug could have slipped through undetected.
That’s because they sometimes do, which leaves many quality assurance and product managers, especially in critical industries, to lose sleep over whether they have done enough to ensure software safety.
One major software supplier in the aerospace industry recently faced such a dilemma when it approached TrustInSoft with a problem.
A customer of the software supplier had discovered an undetected bug in one of several software modules that had been supplied to them, and the software was already fully operational. Once informed of the issue and being directed to resolve it, the supplier needed months to locate, understand, and ultimately rectify the bug, resulting in substantial costs for bug detection and software reengineering. The situation also had a negative impact on the supplier’s reputation and its business relationships with other customers.
That’s when they realized they needed a better, more conclusive way to ward off such incursions and do so confidently.
As a first step, the software supplier consulted TrustInSoft to see if it’s possible to confirm that the bug that had taken the software supplier months to identify was not only truly gone, but that no others were lurking undetected.
In just a few days, analysis revealed several previously undiscovered bugs in addition to what had caused the initial alarm. Each of these subtle bugs would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to detect using conventional methods, which is most likely why they were missed.
TrustInSoft Analyzer’s use of formal methods gives developers definitive proof that their source code is free from memory-safety issues, runtime errors, and security vulnerabilities. The analyzer’s technology is based on rigorously specified mathematical models that verify a software’s properties and behaviors against precisely defined specifications. It can, as a result, identify every potential security vulnerability within the source code.
The integration of formal methods enables users to conduct truly exhaustive analyses. What that means in practice is that complex formal method analysis techniques can be applied to—and keep pace with—increasingly sophisticated software packages. For many organizations, this intensive verification and validation process is now a requirement for safety and security-critical software development teams.
A significant advantage of formal method tools over traditional static analysis tools for both enterprise and open-source testing is the ability to efficiently perform the equivalent of billions of tests in a single run, which is unprecedented in conventional testing environments.
Critical industries provide essential services that have direct importance to our lives. But any defects in the software code at the heart of many of those industries can pose serious risks to human safety. TrustInSoft Analyzer’s ability to mathematically guarantee the absence of bugs in critical software is therefore essential to establish and maintain operational safety before it’s too late.
Caroline Guillaume is CEO of TrustInSoft.
Related Content
- Embedded Software Testing Basics
- Don’t Let Assumptions Wreck Your Code
- Software Testing Needs More Automation
- 5 Software Testing Challenges (and How to Avoid Them)
- Performance-Regression Pitfalls Every Project Should Avoid
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