A Process-oriented Build Tool for Safety-critical Model-based Software Development

摘要

By conquering new application areas, software complexity and size increases steadily. Development cycles must become faster to deliver critical updates in shorter time. Simultaneously, software takes over more and more safety-critical tasks, requiring strict software development processes. Up to today, these processes suffer from extensive manual review work and written, static documentation in form of standards, checklists, and procedures. This paper presents a monolithic, process-oriented build tool for model-based development in MATLAB, Simulink, and Stateflow. Beyond classical build automation functionality, it supports and accelerates process workflows. The tool provides infrastructure to formalize and ship workflows, checklists, and standards, but also features to assess completeness, consistency, compliance, and cleanliness with respect to them. Additionally, it allows definition of dynamic, incrementally updated checklists, and composes traceability in parallel with the build. The efficacy and achievable process coverage is demonstrated in an example application.