What Happened?
Earlier this week, LDRA announced the establishment of a professional services division to help companies developing certification ready products. The LDRA Certification Services (LCS) group is tasked with providing know-how, tools, and services to customers to assure they achieve full compliance at a fixed price. Regarding the expertise of the team selected to lead the LCS division, Operations Director, Ian Hennell states:
“Their collective expertise and policy-making experience in all phases of software, hardware, system development, verification, configuration management and quality engineering assures certification applicants that industry standards will be interpreted and applied correctly.”
LDRA is planning a presentation of the LCS group’s support packages at Embedded World in Nürnberg, Germany from February 28 to March 1.
VDC’s View
Growth in software content and complexity is continuing to drive organizations to find new ways of managing quality and improving efficiency. In many industries, especially those in which the applications have safety or security implications, process control emerged as a leading way through which organizations and regulatory bodies look to control quality. Process and coding standards are now an unavoidable component of the software development workflow, as many industries and individual developers seek to insure consistent annotation and preclude certain unsafe coding constructs.
In our discussions with tool providers and developers alike, a clear consensus has emerged indicating that most developers need to align to at least one standard. We expect this trend to accelerate across almost all vertical markets as evidenced by data VDC gathered last year, shown below.
The requirements imposed on organizations needing to align with and document adherence to any of the prevalent certification standards (DO-178/DO-278, DO-254, DO-297, IEC 61508, IEC 62304, ISO 26262, IEEE 1012:2004 and CENELEC EN 50128) will impact the embedded software market in several ways. In addition to accelerating the use of software & system lifecycle management tools, particularly those offering certification compliance "out of the box", it will help increase opportunities for service offerings and service organizations such as LDRA’s, tailored to aid organizations efficiently and effectively meet the challenges of certification conformance.