Re: [SystemSafety] Qualification of libraries

Dr. Slotosch works with Validas AG, which is a spin-off from work of the Group of Manfred Broy at TUM. As far as I know, they do validation of tools, but not validation of existing libraries for use in safety-critical SW. Esterel has also had TüV Süd inspect their tool suite for use in applications up to SIL 3, but as far as I know TüV Süd has not explicitly inspected and validated libraries for general use in safety-critical SW.

• From what I understand, the manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers have their own, in-house developed libraries for such things. A decade ago, I had a few meetings with Stefan-Alexander Schneider of BMW, also a Broy-group alumnus I understand, about this issue of qualifying existing SW. Dr. Schneider spent a few years evaluating (having evaluated) C compilers according to company-internal dependability requirements and reported at SAFECOMP 2007 in a panel session that they hadn't identified any compilers at all which fulfilled their requirements.

So it was a pretty desperate state of affairs. I don't know that much has changed, because the difficulties of later qualification of existing code are large and I am not aware of any breakthrough. (Statistical evaluation is sometimes an option if the numbers are there in the right context, but many consider, as it was recently put to me by a Wise Owl, "numbers are evil". No they aren't. But the view appears to be widespread.)

One option is to use library functions with a contract specification which is similar to one that has already been fulfilled in some other use. There are such. But many firms which have such libraries/contract specs consider them IP, so good luck getting to them!

PBL On 2015-10-26 15:18 , Stefan Friedrich wrote:

> Perhaps my question was a bit imprecise. I'm rather searching for libraries that are ready to 
> be qualified or are qualified components in the sense of the mentioned standards. (I assume 
> that the qualification has to take into account the context the libs are used in, which means 
> that they have to be qualified by the user after all and that's why the question was I asked 
> for qualification support.)
> 
> I could imagine that qualification of software components requires more effort than tool 
> qualification as they are part of the product.
> 
> Am 26.10.2015 um 14:18 schrieb Rolle, Ingo:

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