Software certification: coding, code, and coders

We describe a certification approach for software development that has been adopted at our organization. JPL develops robotic spacecraft for the exploration of the solar system. The flight software that controls these spacecraft is considered to be mission critical. We argue that the goal of a software certification process cannot be the development of “perfect” software, i.e., software that can be formally proven to be correct under all imaginable and unimaginable circumstances. More realistically, the goal is to guarantee a software development process that is conducted by knowledgeable engineers, who follow generally accepted procedures to control known risks, while meeting agreed upon standards of workmanship. We target three specific issues that must be addressed in such a certification procedure: the coding process, the code that is developed, and the skills of the coders. The coding process is driven by standards. The code is mechanically checked against the standards with ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: EMSOFT
• Authors: Klaus Havelund, Gerard J. Holzmann
• Keywords: EMSOFT 2011, Mission Critical Software, Robotic Spacecraft, Software Engineering, Static Source Code