Object and Source Coverage for Critical Applications with the COUVERTURE Open Analysis Framework

Abstract

This paper presents COUVERTURE, an open coverage analysis framework for safety-critical software development. COUVERTURE offers non- intrusive source and object coverage analysis on un- modified user code, using instrumentation of a virtual execution platform based on QEMU, a flexible and effi- cient open-source CPU emulator. COUVERTURE focuses primarily on the DO-178 civilian avionics certification process: it supports the source coverage analysis activities required for each criticality level. It also provides instruction and branch cover- age analysis of object code. We discuss the relation- ship between execution traces, object coverage met- rics, and source coverage. In particular, we provide a characterization of source constructs for which ob- ject branch coverage implies modified condition/deci- sion coverage, and we discuss the trace collection pro- cess required for those cases where there is no such equivalence. Sources of the software components and qualification material for COUVERTURE are available under open source licenses from the OpenDO site (http://www. open-do.org/).