AdaCore’s GNATcoverage Product Awarded Electron d’Or Prize

Originally developed as part of the Couverture research project, GNATcoverage performs coverage analysis on both object code (instruction and branch coverage) and Ada and C language source code (statement, decision and Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC)). Unlike most current technologies, the tool works without requiring instrumentation of the executable. Instead, it runs directly on an instrumented version of GNATemulator, a lightweight and efficient emulator tool also developed in the context of the Couverture Project. GNATcoverage helps software developers assess the breadth of a testing campaign and provides precise answers to the needs of safety-certification processes, such as the DO-178 avionics standard.

“Open Source has revolutionized the world of operating systems, IDEs and Web tools,” said Dr. Cyrille Comar, Managing Director of AdaCore EU. “We are pleased to bring this revolution to the safety-critical world. Sharing and building on top of others’ achievements in a community with common interests is extremely effective. In the case of project Couverture, we could not have accomplished such a difficult project in such a short time without being able to build on top of other Open Source projects, such as QEMU, GCC, Binutils, etc. We hope that other projects will be built on top of Couverture in the same way.”

Project Couverture was partially funded by the regional authorities of Paris and the Ile-de-France district and the French Ministry of Industry, under the auspices of the Free & Open Source Software group headed by Roberto Di Cosmo in System@tic, the R&D competitive cluster located in the Paris area. The institutions that participated in Project Couverture included AdaCore, Open Wide, Telecom ParisTech, and LIP6. The GNATcoverage and GNATemulator products and the Couverture Project are part of the larger Open-DO initiative that is looking to develop a variety of open source tools, combined with Lean and Agile processes, to aid software certification. More information can be found at www.open-do.org