Determining potential errors in tool chains: Strategies to reach tool confidence according to ISO 26262

Abstract

Due to failures of software tools faults compromising the safety of the developed items may either be injected or not detected. Thus the safety norm for road vehicles, ISO 26262, requires to evaluate all software tools by identifying potential tool failures and measures to detect or avoid them. The result is a tool confidence level for each tool, which determines if and how a tool needs to be qualified. This paper focuses on tool failure identification and proposes two strategies for this task. The function-based strategy derives potential tool failures from a functional decomposition of the tool. The artifact-based strategy analyzes artifacts only. We introduce an analysis tool to support these strategies and discuss their ability to produce lists of failures that are comprehensive, uniform and adequately abstract. This discussion is based on our experience with these strategies in a large scale industrial project. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.