LDRA Wins $1 Million Contract in China’s Manned Spacecraft Programme

The LDRA tool suite has successfully enabled the Chinese space program to achieve safety- and mission-critical certification for its software applications since 2001. In this latest development phase, the CMSP is required to check programming standards to the Chinese Military Standard GJB5369-2005K, undertake and automate unit test, analyse code coverage up to DO-178B Level-A for Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) and verify object code for the critical systems in the Tiangong 1 spacecraft. The LDRA tool suite is the only commercially available tool that meets all of these latest requirements for software testing and providing full lifecycle support.

“Coding standards enforcement has become a widespread requirement in China,” noted Zhiqiang Zhang, CEO of Vision Microsystems. “The LDRA tool suite identifies many deep dataflow defects which cannot be detected by other tools. In addition the tool suite’s automation facilities make unit testing a seamless and highly productive process.”

Key elements of the LDRA tool suite support for CMSP test processes include LDRA Testbed, the process management tool at the core of the LDRA tool suite, which forms the foundation of automated software verification. LDRA Testbed exercises the code, performing quality and design reviews on the source code. It also conducts test verification for code coverage, including statement, branch/decision, MC/DC, test path and procedure/function call metrics.

Coupled with LDRA Testbed is TBrun, LDRA’s automated unit testing tool. With TBrun, a graphical user interface automates the production of test data vectors creating a test harness and stub generation automatically. LDRA takes this technology a significant step further than other vendors by enabling users to create test cases for structural coverage of high-level source code using the object-box mode. These exact same test cases are then applied to the corresponding object code to satisfy DO-178B Level-A requirements. The advanced and highly automated test facilities provided by TBrun pinpoint code defects more efficiently and earlier in the development lifecycle thereby reducing the defects found during formal testing and facilitating on-time and on-budget delivery of software.

“This win extends LDRA’s extensive experience in the Chinese market where the LDRA tool suite has been used by the aerospace and defense software market for projects such as the China Manned Spacecraft and the China Moon Exploration programs,” noted Ian Hennell, LDRA Operations Director. “At LDRA, we are committed to helping developers achieve excellent software quality. It’s exciting to be a part of China’s move to implement these techniques into the entire software development lifecycle and with the entire project team.”