The aerospace industry has a long an enviable track record of passenger safety, and the DO-178 guidance document “Software Considerations in Airborne Systems And Equipment Certification” in all its guises has had a large part to play in that. Updated in 2011 as DO-178C, its processes and procedures continue to be a technical challenge and an administrative headache. 

DO-178C covers the complete software lifecycle: planning, development and integral processes to ensure correctness and robustness in the software. The integral processes include software verification, software quality assurance, configuration management assurance and certification liaison with the regulatory authorities and although they do not oblige developers to use analysis, test, and traceability tools in their work, such tools improve efficiency in all but the most trivial projects to the extent that they have a significant part to play. 

This technical briefing is an introduction to both the DO-178C standard, and the way in which automated tools can help achieve its objectives including bi-directional traceability, test management, source code static analysis, and dynamic analysis of both source and object code.

•        An Overview of DO-178C
•        DO-178C Process Objectives
•        Section 5.0: Software Development Processes
•        Section 6.0: Software Verification Processes
•        Structural Coverage Analysis Objectives
•        Data Coupling and Control Coupling
•        Object-Oriented Technology
•        Model-Based Development
•        Tool Qualification
•        Tool Selection