Patent Pending for LDRA’s New Automated Management of Software Requirements

LDRA’s patent-pending automation of requirements-driven testing and traceability addresses an urgent need in safety- and mission-critical industries such as avionics, medical, defense, and nuclear where requirements traceability and verification consume a significant portion of project budgets. The technology automatically captures requirement information for software development projects from a wide variety of sources and simplifies the construction of a requirements traceability matrix (RTM).

Building on proven technology that verifies software to the most exacting industry standards, LDRA has reached beyond the time-consuming, manual techniques associated with managing requirements traceability and is proud to unveil a solution for automating the construction of requirements traceability matrixes and enforcing the industry-accepted best practice of placing requirements as the focal point for software development and testing. The new technology enables developers to:

• Establish a baseline of selected software requirements from which development and testing will begin
• Delegate the tasks associated with each requirement to members of the development team
• Associate source code with each requirement, thereby automating the creation of trace relationships
• Refine source code mappings to the level of class or even individual functions
• Verify requirements according to a wide variety of analyses and tests performed on the mapped code
• Automatically link requirements, test cases and code coverage results in a unified view of all levels of testing

“Although requirements’ traceability and verification is often imposed on suppliers contractually, more suppliers recognize that requirements-based testing is essential for successful projects even when not requested,” noted Ian Hennell, LDRA’s Operations Director. “However, when companies attempt to construct and maintain a requirements traceability matrix, they quickly learn the truly onerous nature of system and software verification. What LDRA has developed will significantly ease the pain of requirements’ administration and traceability, slashing costs and reducing time lines.”

The integration of this patent-pending requirements software management is expected to launch at Embedded World 2009. These powerful new features will be integrated into the TBmanager Dashboard area of TBreq v3.0, bringing TBreq a quantum leap forward in its ability to manage complex, many-to-many relationships among requirements in multiple levels of a requirements hierarchy. The new TBmanager Dashboard will make this matrix readily accessible and visible to the developers’ workstation for verification and will automatically link test results to enterprise-level reports and a centralized requirements repository.