Tracing & verification system enables audit trail workflow

TBmanager enables development and verification organisations in industries such as aerospace, automotive, industrial controls, rail and medical to expedite development, improve product quality, and decrease potential qualification and certification costs. By seamlessly and bidirectionally linking system artifacts across the software life cycle, TBmanager gives developers immediate visibility of and access to project status in terms of both process and the artifacts being produced and maintained. As a result, project managers can immediately analyse the impact of a requirements change on design, code, and verification activities.

Mectron, a company owned by Odebrecht Defense and Technology, has adopted TBmanager to help achieve DO-178 goals for software verification. Specifically, Mectron used TBmanager to create the audit trail needed to achieve regulatory compliance with rigorous safety-critical standards - a necessary step for the development and production of missiles, radar, avionics systems and communication, and command and control systems for both military and civilian use.

For compliance management and verification activities across the software life cycle, TBmanager imports and leverages requirements from both requirements management and authoring tools, such as IBM Rational DOORS, IBM Rational RequisitePro, and Microsoft Office products. With links connecting the requirements to all other system and software artifacts, developers gain visibility into the software life cycle both up- and downstream. TBmanager captures and aggregates results from the LDRA tool suite’s in-depth static and dynamic analysis tools to provide detailed code quality analysis and structural code coverage analysis as well as unit and integration testing processes and the resulting artifacts.

“By giving customers the opportunity to gain such transparency into the software life cycle, LDRA has transported the compliance verification field to a new level of measurability and analytics,” stated Ian Hennell, Operations Director, LDRA. “Software complexity has increased sharply, making manual requirements traceability time-consuming and error prone. LDRA TBmanager eliminates these costs and ensures high-quality software process by providing immediate insight into the interrelationships among the software verification artifacts and objectives.”

“To achieve certification, we needed to show how our requirements were linked across the entire system from the IBM Rational DOORS requirements engineering database to our code and software tests,” stated David Fernandez, Avionics Systems Engineer, Mectron. “TBmanager enabled us to manage these verification tasks efficiently. We were able to make the final delivery to the customer on time and within budget.”