Automating Target Analysis to Speed up the

Dependability Analysis of complex real time Software

Abstract

Functional safety of software systems is now under control. ATASDAS is a new tool, whose primary function is to elaborate, quickly and automatically, a knowledge database from the source code of existing software. This information provides the basis for a preliminary evaluation of the software, allowing corrections and improvements to be made, as well as offering a pre-evaluation of the safety level aiding in the performance of safety analyses.

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General philosophy

In the current state of progress, the tool contains a limited set of features and carries out simple (but reliable) analyses, hence providing project level and call graph level metrics.  Currently, the mock-up is composed of three operational views: the “Introduction View”, the “Project Management View” and the “Call Graph View”, as well as a set of complementary windows related to the functionalities available from these three main views. A last view, the “Dataflow View” is already reachable, but not finally specified and documented. At term, it will allow to access the dataflow graph and information for the current project.

ATASDAS’s main material is the “Project”. It groups several source files that will be analysed. These sources files represent a software application, or at least a part of it, written in one and only one programming language. Analyses will be carried on step by step.

The first step consists in creating the project by grouping together several related source files. At this point, files are watched with syntactic and source-based criteria.

Next comes the call graph analysis that will lead to information related to the architecture of functions calls in the application.

Once the call graph performed, the user is free to launch dataflow level analyses. They will provide another view of the application, this time based on both the internal control flow of each component, and the data flow relations between components.

Presentations

A presentation of ATASDAS was performed during the Convergence 2003 conference. Slides shown during this conference are available as a Microsoft PowerPoint file, in French or in English.

Industrialisation

ATASDAS evolved to a commercial tool under the name of  imPROVE-C and will be distributed by TNI-Software. The  Technical Overview of the product is now available online.

Consortium members

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