Dynamic analysis slashes development time of complex embedded systems

At this point, however, the error may have resulted in serious injury, loss of life, or a destroyed brand. And, according to a NASA study, in-field errors cost 100 times more to correct than errors identified during software development. Pareon Verify enables companies to avoid such consequences.

In embedded systems, whether smartphones, automobiles, airplanes, or medical devices, the number of lines of code often exceeds tens of millions, with cars easily surpassing 100m. Significantly increased code complexity, with added risk of race conditions or 'software glitches,' has resulted in a breed of bugs that are particularly difficult to detect via traditional methods as changes to the system in a run-time environment cause such errors to disappear.

Pareon Verify exposes the hard-to-find bugs that avoid detection and cause problems in the field. Memory and concurrency errors, among others, are notoriously elusive and add significant time and development cost. Due to their complexity and dynamic nature, traditional testing using static analysis and unit testing cannot find these types of errors as it is impossible to check the unlimited number of variations in timing and memory allocations for every code path.

“Software errors detected after deployment are not only exponentially more expensive to fix, but can negatively impact the brand and reputation of the system provider,” said Martijn Rutten, CEO and Co-Founder, Vector Fabrics. “Pareon Verify, a kind of MRI scanner for millions of lines of code, protects providers from this kind of risk. Pareon Verify analyses the behavior of the system and pinpoints software errors at their origin so that they are easy to fix. Pareon Verify makes the laborious detection of hard-to-find errors through lengthy debug sessions a thing of the past.”

Altran Intelligent Systems, a global integrator of highly connected and complex embedded and real-time systems, identified the advantage of using Pareon Verify to identify hard-to-find errors. “Even though we extensively tested our network stacks using functional tests and static analysis, beta versions exhibited unexpected behavior once they were deployed in the field,” said Jan Asselman, Quality Team Leade, Altran Intelligent Systems. “The dynamic verification capabilities in Pareon Verify enabled us to detect and fix a number of coding errors that previous testing had missed. Thanks to Pareon Verify, we have been able to eliminate those errors and deliver a product that meets our high-quality standards.”

Pareon Verify captures the stream of events that take place as a programme executes and then studies those events for behavioral errors. It then reports the errors in a clear and concise way with detailed references to source code for easy correction of the errors. By implementing Pareon Verify at the beginning of development, companies can follow a process of continuous integration in which a central server builds and runs a test on all newly added source code, checking for errors immediately while the code is fresh in the developers’ minds and can be more easily fixed.