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DO-178C tool qualification

DO-178C (and its predecessor DO-178B), Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification, is the RTCA standard the FAA accepts for certifying avionics software. Understand does not ship a single "DO-178C mode"; instead it provides features that support several parts of a DO-178C program.

Confirm qualification scope with SciTools

Tool qualification is program-, version-, and objective-specific. The features below are verified in the shipped product, but the qualification scope and what evidence a certification authority will accept for your project must be confirmed with SciTools — email support@scitools.com or see contact support.

How Understand helps

Per SciTools' DO-178B/DO-178C guidance, Understand assists with several parts of a DO-178B/DO-178C effort:

  • Software design data — globals-used and globals cross-reference information (via the shipped _globals_used.pl and _globals_xref.pl Perl scripts).
  • Custom coding-standard rules — project-specific rules (for example, "no interrupt handler may be in the call chain of another interrupt handler") can be implemented as CodeCheck checks and re-run automatically as code changes. See write a custom check.
  • Requirements tracing — if requirements are embedded in source as comments, scripts can trace requirements to code and support impact assessment.
  • Code reviews — Understand makes the DO-178C-mandated code reviews more efficient and accurate.

The Check Qualification Report

For the code-analysis part of qualification, Understand ships a Check Qualification Report. It validates that your CodeCheck rules actually behave as specified, using Understand's built-in validation engine (UValid), and produces documentation of the results.

In a DO-178C qualification effort the flow is:

  1. Configure CodeCheck with the rules your DO-178C objectives require.
  2. Run a CodeCheck inspection over your codebase.
  3. Generate the Check Qualification Report — it runs pre-defined test suites that exercise each check and records pass/fail results per test case, giving you the evidence a certification authority needs that each rule works as intended.

You reach it from the CodeCheck configurations dialog via the Qualification Report action ("Open a qualification report").

Qualification report ≠ compliance report

The compliance report shows whether your code conforms to a standard (Compliant / Not Compliant / Not Supported per rule). The Check Qualification Report shows whether the checking tool itself is trustworthy — that each check is validated by tests. A qualification effort typically needs both.

Getting started with DO-178C

  1. Pick or build the checks your objectives require — see which standard, the standards catalog, and write a custom check.
  2. Run them across the codebase and triage as in the compliance lifecycle.
  3. Generate the Check Qualification Report for tool-verification evidence.
  4. For a full qualification kit (Aspen, custom-standard implementation, or scope confirmation), contact support@scitools.com.

For functional-safety certification (ISO 26262 / IEC 61508 / EN 50128) rather than avionics, see Is Understand certified?.