Qualification kit overview

A qualification kit, is a collection of documents, procedures, and information used in various industries and contexts to assess, validate, and certify the quality, performance, and compliance of a product, system, or process.

What is a qualification kit and how to access it?

As part of the certification process, all the verification tools, such as Test Embedded, must be qualified. The qualification of a verification tool requires to demonstrate that the tool does what it claims to do, that involves writing down the specification or a list of requirements of the tool, and then the test suite to validate those requirements, and to create a traceability matrix.

To avoid you to do this process by yourselves, the development team provide a qualification kit that contains the specification of the capabilities of the product Test Embedded the one used for the certification as well as the test suite needed to validate those capabilities.

The qualification kit is not shipped with the Test Embedded, since the content of the kit includes the detailed specifications and the test suites of the components of the Test Embedded product. Therefore, the kit is considered HCL confidential materials. However, you can under active maintenance request a copy of the kit, after you have signed a specific Confidential Disclosure Agreement with HCL.
Note: For each new version of the Test Embedded product, there is a corresponding new version of the qualification kit.

Qualification kit for code review

The qualification kit for MISRA demonstrate that the feature tool Code Review (CRC) effectively performs what it claims to do, that involves writing down the specification of the set of rules which serves as a list of requirements, it also includes the test suite to validate the set of rules or requirements, and then create a traceability matrix. The kit is available for MISRA 2004 and 2012, and is available for C language.

Does a kit exist for your Machine/OS/Target?

Test Embedded run on a specific host and operating system and is able to run tests on any target. The provided qualification kit validates the Test Embedded performance on the host system used for the Target deployment port (TDP). Only one qualification kit is provided, and it can run on supported host and the operating system. The qualification kit must be run after each use of Target deployment port in order to demonstrate that the tool does what it claims to do for each used Target deployment port. Therefor the kit must be installed on the same host where Test Embedded is installed and when you run the qualification kit, it generates final reports that confirms the qualification of the tool for the dedicated target.

What is the real impact of DO-178C and ED-12C?

DO-178C and ED-12C are now released. What does this mean to you and for Test Embedded

Now that RCTA DO-178 and its European equivalent, EUROCAE ED-12, have been updated after nearly twenty years, many are wondering, what is the impact on you and on Test Embedded. We have provided you with products based on DO-178B and ED-12B guidelines for over 10 years and have deployed qualification kits on many programs. With the arrival of DO-178C and ED-12C we can incrementally adopt the standard in our future offerings.

The guidelines are now published in other RTCA and EUROCAE document called:

DO-330/ ED-215, Software Tool Qualification Considerations

The one significant change for Test Embedded in DO-178C and ED-12C certification evidence is that all requirements for verification tools, such as code coverage tools, are moved into formal RTCA document, DO-330 (EUROCAE ED-215).

All of DO-178B/ED-12B qualification that is provided today in Kit meet the requirements of DO-178C and ED-12C TQL-5.

The next generation of qualification kit will be created to enhance it to demonstrate compliance to DO-330/ED-215 TQL-4.

DO-330 now defines five qualification levels for tools (TQL-1 through TQL-5) and objectives for each level depending on the software level of verification. The total number of objectives in DO-330 exceeds the number of DO-178B objectives in some cases. This means that developers who previously qualified tools using Tool Operational Requirements and Tool Qualification Documents, also need to produce other documents required by DO-330 and show a compliance matrix to the applicable objectives and then have these data items approved by the certification authority. In short, qualification of tools has become a much more formal process in DO-330 than it was with DO-178B.

While the core DO-178C/ED-12C document was not changed substantially, there are changes to the guidance that may impact how some companies demonstrate compliance. For example, it is expected that you can create low-level requirements that can be explicitly tested and it may no longer be permissible to test only high level requirements and demonstrate source code coverage. Moreover, one would also need to create robustness requirements that must be tested. In such scenarios, special test cases may be required to stimulate these conditions. Test Embedded tool can be employed to assist in robustness verification.

If you use object oriented design you must demonstrate compliance to DO-332 and others who chose to use model-based development or formal methods of verification will have to use DO-331 and DO-333, respectively.