/> With more than 30 years experience and penetration into 65 countries, Analox leads in many gas-sensing applications—from sport and commercial diving to carbon dioxide in beverages. With the need to gain IEC 61508 compliance for these projects and to increase their competitive edge, Analox turned to LDRA for superior tools and improved software development processes. LDRA’s MISRA-C: 2004 compliance, TBeXtreme’s automated test generation, and LDRA Testbed’s code assessment metrics provided the tool base Analox needed to gain compliance and improve its methodology.

“Not only did LDRA offer superior standard compliance and test generation, but their tool suite was the only product able to be integrated successfully with our tool chain,” noted Chris Allen, Design Engineer, Analox, “Using the LDRA tool suite has changed how we do testing. We now follow best-practice methodology and, as a result, have increased productivity and quality while reducing costs.”

“LDRA prides itself in helping customers move towards zero-defect software,” noted Ian Hennell, LDRA Operations Director. “Far too many companies battle cost and schedule overruns that can be easily addressed by tools that enforce quality programming and automate tedious manual tasks such as test generation. With these improvements, the human error factor is removed and many software bugs are identified early, dramatically reducing programming errors and debug cost.”

For both projects, the LDRA tool suite was integrated with the Keil tool suite, Hi-Tech PICC18 and MPLab tool chains. Analox used LDRA’s TBrun and TBeXtreme to automate the testing and stub generation needed for IEC 61508 without the tremendous time and resources typically needed for such tasks. As well, Analox tailored the MISRA rules for their application and used the LDRA tool suites static analysis engine to monitor their code compliance at all times. Using LDRA’s dynamic testing, Analox was able to complete the functional testing and complete code coverage needed for compliance.

“Thanks to the extremely positive experience we’ve had using the LDRA tool suite, Analox plans to ramp up our use of LDRA’s tools for all projects with a safety requirement,” added Allen. “Because of the changes LDRA has brought us, we now have best-practice methodology and we are seeing the benefits of this on our bottom line.”