Requirements to code review bot for safety critical software
2022-26-1237
05/26/2022
- Event
- Content
- Development of any safety critical software applications such as in the aerospace industry needs to comply to specific standards (DO178) to meet airworthiness requirements. This standard is normally applicable to all airborne systems and equipment. As such, the software development needs to perform certain verification activities to comply to the standard objectives. One of the verification activities is the source code inspection of review to check the implementation meets the specification captured in the form of requirements and other aspects such as coding style guidelines and documentation example, indentation used in code, sufficient comments or notes in the code files etc. Generally, this activity is carried out manually supplemented by tools which are deployed to check errors and standards in the code by means of static analysis and practices such as test-driven development (TDD), wherein, the testing and analysis is done prior to the reviews. However, software quality still relies on the tests and analysis done prior to the reviews; it does not entirely do away with manual reviews. This activity also requires independence that is someone other than author to review it as well as needs more than one reviewer. This increases cost of quality. At the same time, the development teams have a challenge in meeting both the schedule and quality. This paper discusses potential approaches to improve code quality for safety critical software, where today we have several static code analyzers, however, requirements to code checkers are not readily available. It identifies approaches to apply machine learning techniques to this automation and a framework to incorporate this into the existing peer review process performed for airborne software. The paper also discusses the challenges in automating review activity to improve quality, reduce cost and adhere to standards (such as DO178) at the same time.
- Citation
- Hossain, S., Taggarsi, B., and Kameshwari Prasad Dev, M., "Requirements to code review bot for safety critical software," SAE Technical Paper 2022-26-1237, 2022, .