UK bug detection service

Citation

(2005), "UK bug detection service", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 77 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2005.12777bab.014

UK bug detection service

UK bug detection service

Keywords: Software, Automotive industry, Safety, UK

PolySpace Technologies, a leading company in the automatic detection of run-time errors at compile time, has launched a software bug detection service in the UK. The PolySpace Bug Detection Service (BDS) provides software development teams with an independent verification service for their code before compilation and functional testing.

“The cost of fixing code increases exponentially according to the time from the start of the project,” noted Ken Nathan, UK managing director of PolySpace. “The sooner you catch the anomalies, the easier it is to fix and the less time it takes. In some industries such as aerospace, there can be no margin for error. Despite this, we believe that up to 70 per cent of all software development still relies on post-compilation testing.”

One of the first customers, Mike Ellims from Pi Technology, commented: “As a leading designer of safety-related automotive systems, Pi Technology is always looking for improvements in quality and efficiency. The Polyspace service allowed us to add manpower to a critical project, performing a specific verification task, while minimising the overheads associated with learning the application. Part of our project involved the use of code from a third party: the Polyspace service proved to be a very efficient way of finding potential errors in the third-party code”.

The PolySpace Bug Detection Service (BDS) is aimed at companies and development teams that need a fast turnaround on testing the validity of their software, but have not invested in a full suite of software validation tools. The service uses the PolySpace suite of static verification tools for Ada and C code to provide customers with a full report on their embedded code. Turnaround time and costs are dependent on the size of the application.

PolySpace Technologies uses a technique called static verification to analyse software at an early stage of development to ensure that it will work. It will detect and highlight faults such as referencing a variable that does not exist or trying to divide another variable by zero. The technique, which has been known mathematically for many years, was developed into a tool by PolySpace Technologies in order to verify software for embedded applications.

Details available from: PolySpace Technologies. Tel: +44 (0)1494 616051.