IMPASA - Improving Aerospace Software Assurance

IMPASA will reduce the cost of development and testing of new safety critical aerospace software through the two new technologies for verification and automatic review of software source code.

As the role of complex safety-critical software in aircraft continues to increase, the cost and challenge of ensuring the software is safe and error free grows too. One mandatory technique used throughout aerospace is careful review of software, often using manual techniques supplemented with a variety of tools. These tools are still difficult and expensive to use, so we seek to improve the area of code review by application of new technology.

The key innovations are the development and application of technologies for:

• a) Managing reviews in the software development cycle; the software "ReviewAssistant" tool will pull together data from diverse sources (comments, static analysis, complexity metrics, checklists, test results, test coverage, etc.) in a coherent and coordinated format. The key innovation will be designing the paradigm for presenting this diverse information to a reviewer so that the total is greater than the sum of the parts -- giving greater efficiency for the reviewer and more effective reviews.
• b) Automatic checking and analysing software source code; RapiComply will analyse source code for quality, adherence to coding guidelines and bug detection. The technology will be customizable, fast, interactive and use special features for management of false positives to reduce the cost of using tools. The goal is to reduce effort of manual code review, especially where software revisions change and effort needs to be repeated by checking the same code multiple times.As more complex software systems are introduced to support the next generation of air transport, the cost and time to review software will increase dramatically. The combined innovations of a single ReviewAssistant underpinned with automatic analysis software allows aerospace developers to reduce development and verification effort. The planned technologies will be increased from TRL3 to TRL5, focusing on Ada and C languages. Two different use cases ensure a strong exploitation path for the two technologies to allow them to enter the market with aerospace customer-focused features.