Tool Qualification Package according to DO-178B for Tessy

If a safety-critical project is developed according to the avionics standard DO-178B, a qualification of the development tools may be necessary.

This applies also to Tessy, a tool to automate the testing of the low-level requirements according to DO-178B.
To support the tool qualification, a package is available to verify that no test with an unexpected result will be marked “passed” in the test report.
The package consists of documents and carefully assembled test cases. The documents describe the functionality of Tessy and to what extent it needs to be verified by the package at hand. The test cases shall verify, that an actually failed test case is marked the same in the test report. For example, some test cases verify, that a result value outside the accepted limits (e.g. -2%) results in a failed test case. Other test cases verify that code coverage of 100% is not achieved if the test object was only partially executed.
If required, an adaptation of the tool qualification package to the user’s project can be done very easily. E.g. the test cases of the package may need to be exercised with exactly the version of the cross compiler that is used for the safety-critical project at hand.
The tool qualification package was designed for DO-178B, but it is also useful for projects that are developed according to other standards such as IEC 61508.
Even Tessy users that do not explicitly use the tool qualification package profit from it, because it goes without saying that prior to each new release, Tessy is checked by using the test cases of the package.
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