Ian Hennell LDRA Operations Director LDRA

LDRA, a leading provider of automated software verification, source code analysis and test tools, has fully integrated the LDRA tool suite with IBM Rational Rhapsody ensuring a seamless workflow from model-driven development to test and verification. IBM Rational Rhapsody, a UML-based modeling and code-generation tool, speeds the design of complex systems that often must meet industry certification standards.

Thanks to this integration, developers can easily and efficiently access the LDRA tool suite from within the Rhapsody platform to ensure that their generated code complies with industry standards, follows best-practice programming guidelines and is fully tested. The LDRA tool suite intelligently obtains information from the model and automates the development and configuration of the potentially complex test harness. Freed from this labor-intensive and typically error-prone process, the developer can concentrate on the analysis and testing of the application.  

LDRA Tool Suite Tests from within Rhapsody Process
With the power of the LDRA tool suite fully accessible through the Rhapsody model-driven development process, developers can select the section of code they are working on, quickly perform code review and gain immediate insight into the quality of their code. The ability to review call graphs, flow graphs or metrics such as code complexity can be done for each class without leaving the Rhapsody environment.

In creating the test harness, the LDRA tool suite uses information from the Rhapsody model to intelligently configure the test harness, and automatically creates appropriate test stubs, depending on the level of verification required. For rigorous certification requirements that require proof that any and all possible options within the application code are fully tested, Rhapsody developers can use TBeXtreme, an LDRA tool suite component that automatically creates test cases that can prove all code has been fully tested and complete code coverage obtained.

Manage Verification of Model-Driven Development
“Avionics systems with their leap from eight percent software in the 1960s to eighty percent in this decade reflect an industry norm,” noted Ian Hennell, LDRA Operations Director. “To cope with this steep increase in the amount of software while also striving for certification, improved software quality and shorter time to market, many companies are adopting model-driven development to abstract away the complexities of the applications. By tying those models into an automated test process, companies accelerate the path to improved code quality as typically error-prone manual processes are replaced with automated and independent verification activities, ensuring that the code performs correctly and as specified.”

The complete integration of the LDRA tool suite and IBM Rational Rhapsody enables developers and project managers to perform code review, quality review and dynamic analysis on the whole model as well as to regress any unit tests. Although an interactive execution session may be appropriate on smaller projects, large project verification activities can be controlled via batch files, saving a significant amount of time and ensuring that project managers can more easily delve into and assess project progress while identifying and correcting any problems at the model level.

The LDRA tool suite plug-in is currently available for the Windows platform, with a Linux version planned for a future release.

For more than 40 years, LDRA has developed and driven the market for software that automates code analysis and software testing for safety-, mission-, security- and business-critical markets. Working with clients to achieve early error identification and full compliance with industry standards, LDRA traces requirements through static and dynamic analysis to unit testing and verification for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Boasting a worldwide presence, LDRA is headquartered in the UK with subsidiaries in the United States and an extensive distributor network.