In DO-178B, “software” pertains to all drivers, Board Support Package (BSP), real-time operating system (RTOS), libraries, graphics, and application software.  Developing software for safety-critical certification applications involves considerably more documentation, up-front requirements-based design, requirements traceability, testing, and verification.

Tools for DO-178B\ED-12B certification can be categorized as either

• development tools that will produce code that will fly in the aircraft or
• verification tools that will be used as part of the certification process to verify or check steps but will not produce code that will fly in the aircraft.
  

Tool qualification requires demonstrating a tool’s conformance with DO-178B\ED-12B in the same way that the developer’s end product is to be certified.

Concerning the qualification of software development tools, DO-178B\ED-12B goes further to state that the development processes for such tools should satisfy the same objectives as the software development processes for airborne software.  As a result, the software level assigned to the tool should be the same as the level for the airborne software that it produces.

VAPS QCG from Presagis has been developed to conform to DO-178B as a development tool and is thus qualifiable.  DO-178B stipulates that tools can only be qualified on a given project, and VAPS QCG has been qualified on a number of projects using the Certification Kit ‘off-the-shelf’.

The main advantage of using a qualified tool like VAPS QCG is that the user can automateor reduce the level of effort spent on certification, and these reductions can only be achieved by using “qualifiable” development tools. Non-qualifiable tools do not reduce the effort of final certification at all because the user is forced to undertake all of the documentation and testing as if no tool had been used, a process that is both time consuming and costly. 

Specific users have indicated that 70-80% time savings across the entire project, including such factors as the number of engineers working on the project, user experience, and the complexity of the actual application being built, is not an unrealistic metric.

Other key benefits to using VAPS QCG are as follows:

• complete control and ownership of the display format and resulting Intellectual Property (IP),
• changes to the VAPS display format can be easily communicated and implemented in a matter of minutes without any modification to the underlying platform,
• development artifacts used in a VAPS QCG port for a specific platform configuration can be re-used across multiple projects sharing that same configuration, thereby leading to important reductions in development time and certification effort,
• new HMI applications can be developed and have code generated to the target platform as well, resulting in additional time and cost savings,
• more control over a project by performing the VAPS QCG porting work without the need for specialist knowledge,
• the use of VAPS QCG on subsequent projects greatly reduces risk because VAPS QCG will have been recognized as certifiable on previous projects,
• fewer programming and specialized skill sets required,
• faster time to market, greater reliability, and overall better service to the OEM.