Asia gets ready for ISO 26262

On my way back to Singapore, I stopped for several days in China, visiting Automotive organizations with our local reseller Hirain Technologies. I just finished the work on two additional unit testing integrations, both based on the Code Warrior development environment, one for MPC and the other for HC12. All had their particular set of challenges – a previously unsupported debugger, the absence of any ports besides BDM – but the tool is pretty flexible, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Chinese companies are not the only ones in Automotive upgrading their software testing infrastructure. Everywhere in Asia, Europe and North America, OEMs and suppliers alike are contemplating how they will comply with ISO 26262, the Automotive industry’s answer to the highly successful DO-178B standard in Aerospace.

This is not motivated by a strong legal obligation like the kind the FAA and its counterparts in other countries are imposing on the plane manufacturers, but by a real, genuine willingness to improve product safety through superior code quality. And this is occurring not a moment too soon – the amount of software in today’s vehicles stands at an impressive 100 million lines of code, more lines than aircraft, according to this source. Software runs everything, from the navigation systems to the engine to the brakes, and cases of recalls based on software faults has reportedly occurred already at household names such as Ford and Toyota.

Besides this, as a representative of Hyundai (a VectorCAST user) stated during a conference being held by our local Korean distributor MDS Technology, there are perfectly good legal reasons to comply with ISO 26262 even if no government authority is mandating it. The idea here is that if something goes wrong and the problem is traced to a software that did not comply with ISO 26262, this could open the door wide open to litigation and/or otherwise increase legal exposure.

That particular fact is small comfort to already overburdened software engineers and testers that in many cases apprehend just how much more work will the ISO 26262 add to their workload. After all, that standard explicitly calls for unit and integration testing based on software code and the use of code coverage as a metric to determine when the application was sufficiently tested. And furthermore, it requires organizations to test these in their target board or, when not practical, something as close as possible to the real target (see ISO 26262 draft, section 6, paragraph 9.4.5, especially note #2).

But the real good news here is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel – Aerospace companies largely cleared the way. Executing unit test cases without spending inane amount of time writing test code is absolutely possible. That pesky requirement to execute out of a board or simulator? That one is figured out too! All you need is to go with a good software testing tool suite that is highly automated, mature and flexible, backed up by a superior level of customer service.

A few examples might help illustrate my point. A few tool vendors boast they can do all of ISO 26262 code coverage criteria (statement, branch, MCDC…), but how many of them will do so while minimizing the reduction in the speed of execution (timing being pretty important in Automotive)? Well, all tools are not created equal there – in one specific case, we were the only software code coverage tool that did not cause the program to reset. And when I explained to a client of mine what a unit testing stub would do for him (i.e. enable him to isolate a piece of software and control the inputs and outputs to his functions), I could almost see a light bulb lighting up above his head! And even more so when I told him the tool would do that automatically for him, with no need for him to provide testing code.

In any case, mine was a good trip, but I am still looking forward to the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. In the meantime, I continue to enjoy local delicacies such as this stick of “mini apples” (no idea what is the name of that fruit in English) glazed with brown sugar, which is available around October onward from one of the many street vendors in Beijing for about 30 cents per stick. Sweet and sour just like I love my treats to be! Yummy!