DO-178B/ED-12B

DO-178B is produced by Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, Inc. (RTCA), the FAA's Advisory Circular AC20-115B established DO-178B as the accepted means of certifying all new aviation software. RTCA DO-178B defines the guidelines for development of aviation software in the USA. EUROCAE ED-12B is the European equivalent to DO-178B. The success of DO-178B has spread to other industries and is the basis of many certification processes in use today.

DO-178B is primarily concerned with development processes. As a result, certification to DO-178B requires delivery of multiple supporting documents and records. The quantity of items needed for DO-178B certification, and the level of certification being sought determines the amount of information that they must contain.

The targeted DO-178B certification level is either A, B, C, D, or E. Correspondingly, these DO-178B levels describe the consequences of a potential failure of the software: catastrophic, hazardous-severe, major, minor, or no-effect. As a result, few CASE tools, DO178B software analysis tools, or DO-178B software development environments can be used for the difficult task of developing systems and software for DO-178B applications.

Telelogic® Rhapsody® enables certification and produces DO-178B/ED-12B certifiable code. The ability to capture requirements, design, implementation, test and documentation all within Telelogic Rhapsody enables the user to follow a well defined, repeatable and requirements driven process within Telelogic Rhapsody. A well-defined and repeatable process is the key to DO-178B/ED-12B certification.

One of the key concepts behind DO-178B is that all the requirements are covered by the code and that all the code that exists is directly due to a requirement. The Telelogic® Rhapsody Gateway Add On™ makes this an easy task. By providing the ability to work with leading requirements management tools along with popular requirements authoring tools such as Word, Excel or even Telelogic Rhapsody itself it is possible to trace the requirements to the implementation. In addition it is possible to perform impact analysis to determine what impact a change may have.

The Telelogic Rhapsody Design for Testability (DFT) products Telelogic® Rhapsody TestConductor™ and Telelogic® Rhapsody Automatic Test Generation™ enable requirements based testing, model coverage and code coverage tests to be automated. This eases the process of ensuring the design meets the requirements and that the proper level of coverage, including MC/DC, testing has been performed. In addition it helps to ensure that no unused or "dead code" exists.

The Telelogic Rhapsody generated code is highly controllable and can be tailored to meet your safe coding practices. These powerful capabilities coupled with the ability to produce code that is time deterministic and reliable are just some of the reasons the number of certified applications using Telelogic Rhapsody continues to grow.

IBM support for DO-178B doesn't stop with Rhapsody. The IBM Professional Services can also be of assistance when it comes to tailoring the Telelogic Rhapsody real-time Framework, producing test suites or for creating the artifacts required for certification.