Validas — Tool and Library Qualification

In this episode we will learn from Dr. Oscar Slotosch about Function based library qualification and why Validas usually chooses this method among others library qualification approaches! Tune in! 

In  this special Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will enjoy the company of a  special guest: Florian Grigoleit. During this pleasant chat with Oscar, Florian will share with us his experience as safety engineer and founder of Modelwise! Tune in!

In this special Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will enjoy the company of a special guest: Benjamin Flach. Banjamin is the AUTOSAR expert at Validas, and during this pleasant chat with Oscar, he will get us into the world of AUTOSAR and its qualification. Tune in to discover more!

In our  Episode 11 Dr. Oscar Slotosch will discuss the choice of colors in the Validas' Tool chain Analyzer (TCA). Nothing can be left to chance, tune in to know more about why colors are important!

In  today's  Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will talk about traceabilty in Tool Qualification. We will hear why we can't give up on traceabilty in tools and libraries qualification, and how TCA can support in keeping traceability always under control. Tune in!

In our new Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch is going to discuss how to handle findings when testing tools&libraries. And we will hear about interesting findings examples he has encountered during his career. Tune in!

In Today’s Episode we will hear about English for safety experts. In general, but especially in a legal context also nuances in the language can be very important to best interpret safety standards. Dr. Oscar Slotosch will share with us some tips in this regard. Tune in to know more!

In today’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will tell us about a new exciting challenge for Validas: building and maintaining a new growing Qualification Kit to support the IBM engineering Tool Suite. How do Validas together with IBM have planned to make this a successful project? tune in to discover the details!

In our new episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will discuss Tool Qualification in IEC 61508. A safety standard that he uses to define as mother of all standards. If you want to know why, and learn many other interesting details about IEC61508, just tune in!

In today’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will give us an overview about safety conferences. He will tell us about his experience as chairman and speaker at the 2021 online conference on automotive ISO 26262 functional safety, and will give us some exciting news about other coming conferences. Tune in!

In today’s episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch will give an overview of the DDO-330, a safety standard originally developed in the avionics domain. DO-330 was, in fact, built for the qualification of avionics software, but is today a stand-alone standard focused on tool-qualification, and can be of great support also in other fields. To know more tune in to our new episode!

Known bugs are one of the main concepts in safety. Most of the big software projects maintain a list of known bugs. Why are they so important and how can we handle them? In this Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will discuss about this and much more. Including how known bugs are integrated and modeled within the Tool Chain Analyser (TCA) at Validas.

How can Validas’ team generate arbitrary documentation fast and efficiently?

In this final episode of the first season of our podcast, Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses Validas’s Tool Chain Analyzer for Software (TCA-SW), which contains the automated document generation and visual representations that can help you effectively ‘re-engineer’ your projects with safety as a priority. Tune in to learn about the intricacies of the TCA-SW and the differences and similarities in the approach Validas takes to analyze tools and libraries using their Tool Chain Analyzer.

In this short question episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch introduces Validas’s growing QKit — a qualification kit that contains as few or as many components as you need, and that grows and expands with the size of your project.

What does it mean to validate a tool, and what to verify it — and where do we find these terms in tool qualification prescribed by the ISO 26262 safety standard? In this short question episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch clarifies common misunderstandings and explains when it is appropriate to perform a code review, and when a tool should be tested.

To make the process of building safe products more efficient and reliable, Validas has developed a generic safety plan for software and safety elements out of context (SEOOC), which has the added benefit of generating all the required ISO documents automatically from its model. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch presents the generic safety plan and explains how it can be used to speed up the creation of safety cases — for a variety of safety standards and projects.

In the development of modern medical procedures and devices, and especially those that directly affect a person’s health, the safety of software tools needs to be paramount. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch shares his insights into the topic of qualification for medical devices, including the current requirements and processes defined by safety standards and governmental agencies, as well as the future developments we can expect in the field of medical tools.

To have high confidence in a qualified tool, we should be able to detect its potential errors with a high probability. This condition is commonplace within safety standards, but what does high probability mean in practice? In this short question episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains how high probability of error detection should — or shouldn’t — be measured and how we can achieve it in tool qualification.

Tool safety is not crucial just for the production of physical parts and mechanical devices, but it has also had an important role in the monitoring of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch responds to the recent news of the English government losing thousands of data entries by their unsafe use of Microsoft Excel, which may have caused irreversible damage to the contact tracing and pandemic containment efforts in the United Kingdom.

As a key technique in any large-scale project, process modeling also has a role in qualification — but the right process modeling tool can provide you with more advantages than you would expect. Join Dr. Oscar Slotosch in this episode to learn about the process modeling technology (PMT) used by Validas, the design that went into its creation, and the features Validas experts use to simplify tool and library qualification projects.

MCDC is a ubiquitous technique used in software testing, but the tools that test it must also be appropriately qualified. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch gives an overview of this code coverage criterion, explains its history and development, and shares his experiences with its advantages and disadvantages for tool qualification.

In this week’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch takes you on a deep dive into the Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) — a crucial construct that is defined in the ISO 26262 safety standard. Join us to learn why the SEooC is an important concept for qualification of tools and libraries, why its use can be a great advantage, and whether it should be the provider or the integrator to qualify it.

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch revisits the topic of tool confidence, clears misunderstandings, and explains the details of how tool confidence level (TCL) should be taken from the ISO 26262 safety standard into practice.

The process by which tools can have an impact on the safety of your project is not always straightforward or easy to understand. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch devotes special attention to the ways in which tools can introduce or overlook errors and how we can determine their overall impact. Listen in for a summary of tool impact requirements and recommendations across different safety standards and models — including Oscar’s own experiences with special cases, such as model checkers and timing analysis tools.

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch brings you an introduction to ISO 26262, the crucial safety standard used in the automotive industry — and one of Oscar’s fields of expertise. Join us to understand the purpose and role of ISO 26262, but also to learn about the concepts of the Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), and the Safety Element out of Context (SEooC). Whether you are new to safety standards or curious about the minute changes in the revised version of ISO 26262, this episode has something for you.

Do all tools need to be qualified, or can we simply trust the famous ones that have been used successfully in thousands of different environments? Tune in to our fourth short question episode to learn from Dr. Oscar Slotosch about why even famous tools need to be treated with care and where computer bugs really come from.

Effective mitigation measures, which have been introduced in part 7.4.4.8 of the second edition of the IEC 61508 standard, are crucial to efficient safety planning — but to construct an effective mitigation strategy, we first need to understand its precise definition in relevant safety standards and what the use of mitigations means for its required workload. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch shares his experience with successful mitigation strategies, discusses Validas’s automated approach to mitigation planning, and explains what effective mitigation really means in practice.

This episode brings you a special discussion of C++ exceptions, in which Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Jakob Riedle of Validas joined forces with Dr. Philipp Robbel, Principal of Mapless AI, an up-and-coming company conducting research in applied artificial intelligence and autonomous system safety. Tune in to learn about the way C++ exceptions are handled in safety-critical projects, which requirements common safety standards have for their use, and how Mapless AI integrates exceptions in their projects — creating safe autonomy that doesn’t rely on maps.

In this week’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the details of safety compliance and its role in safety-relevant software projects. Join us to learn what safety standards require in terms of compliance, what is meant by safety integrity, why compliance reports should always be included your projects, and what procedure Validas uses to ensure compliance — efficiently and reliably.

To successfully test a tool or a library, especially in safety-relevant projects, it is crucial to test for all important cases; in some situations, this can become increasingly difficult to do without automation. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the usage and purpose of test case generators with Jakob Riedle, who has spent the past two years developing ForeC++ — Validas’s own test case generator. Join us to learn about the biggest challenges in creating a test case generator, how these tools can help you comply with safety standards, and what Jakob has done to develop ForeC++ to its current form.

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the role of code coverage in the qualification of tools and libraries. Tune in to learn about how code coverage is applied in a safety analysis, the importance of the modified condition/decision coverage (MCDC) criterion in software testing, and why code coverage analysis is strongly recommended, but almost never required by modern safety standards.

Despite the restrictions imposed by the ongoing global pandemic, the work at Validas continues — even if it is from home — and this includes our podcast. In this episode we return to the basics to discuss qualification kits and, in particular, Validas’s own QKit. Join us to learn how the first instance of QKit was developed, which features of a qualification kit are useful for a customer, and how you can recognize a bad one.

To expand on our last episode, in which we discussed tool chains, Dr. Oscar Slotosch talks to Robert Reitmeier — Validas’s own expert on tool chain modeling. In this episode Robert explains each step of the process of tool chain modeling for safety-relevant projects, shares tips on how to use Validas’s Tool Chain Analyzer to its full power, and reveals what new features his team is soon hoping to develop.

Tool chains are more than just sets of interconnected tools — in a safety analysis, they are often the crucial component, albeit not one that is trivial to manage. In this episode we discuss why we should be paying attention to tool chains when building a software project, how tool chains should be documented, and what requirements safety standards impose on their definition.

If you have been listening to our podcast, you might have wondered about Validas — the types of projects we work on and the mission of Validas in the world of tool and library qualification. You’re in luck; the two CEOs of Validas, Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Dr. Peter Braun, have come together to discuss the successes and challenges of their company, the types of customers they work with, their favorite research projects, and the future of Validas itself.

In safety-relevant projects, you either need to mitigate for potential errors each time you interact with a tool or you need to qualify it — but can tool qualification save you money? In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains how to correctly evaluate whether all the cost and effort put toward mitigation can be lessened by a well thought out tool qualification, and how to find out if you could be saving money by using qualified tools.

What is confidence in the safety of tools and libraries, and how do you buy or create it for your own products? Within safety standards, confidence is a clearly defined technical term, but it relies on subjective evaluation — so how can you be confident in the safety of the tools you use? In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains the importance of confidence for safety-critical projects and reflects on the focus recent safety standards have begun to give it.

How can you tell if the tool you are using has been qualified? Tune in to our third bonus question episode with Dr. Oscar Slotosch to find out how this complicated question can have a simple answer.

In this week’s episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch explores the importance of the Tool Safety Manual — an essential part of qualification documentation and the only resource the end user has to help them use a tool safely. Learn how tool safety manuals are created and how you can use them responsibly, but also what it is that makes a tool safety manual good. At the end of this episode, Oscar announces a special project: Validas’s online database of good tool qualification kits.

Even though non-deterministic compilers may not be ideal for use in a safety-relevant project, they can still be qualified. Our new question episode goes beyond the usual topics of compiler qualification and answers the question of whether — and how — non-deterministic compilers can be qualified.

Did ISO 26262 abolish tool qualification in its second edition? In our first bonus episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains why the answer is quite to the contrary — the second edition of ISO 26262 has put an even stronger emphasis on tool qualification.

Unlike tools, libraries are elements in software development that get directly used in a finished product — therefore, their reliability and safety is paramount. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch introduces you to the topic of library qualification and explains what makes it so crucial. Join us to learn how to safely use publicly available libraries, how Validas qualifies libraries, which special properties must be checked in library qualification, and much more.

What is a good qualification and how can you recognize it? In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch shares his experience and insights on what makes a QKit good — and what makes it bad. Does it save you time and money, or does it sow doubt in your users? Join us and learn how to recognize the crucial elements of a good, reliable qualification.

Creating and maintaining a reliable set of qualification documents is one of the most important tasks of a tool provider or user. In this episode we delve into the topic of documentation, list the mandatory and recommended documents that should be included in every qualification, and discuss how different types of qualification require different approaches in documentation. Oscar also includes a few stories and talks about Validas’s perspective on why good documentation matters.

This week’s episode is an introduction to qualification test strategies — join Dr. Oscar Slotosch to learn about qualification testing and how it differs from quality testing, how a test strategy is designed, and what principles should be followed when deciding how many test cases to run. In this episode we will also help you determine the exact number of test cases required for an efficient qualification test.

The Tool Chain Analyzer (TCA) is a crucial part of Validas’s framework — it is used to model complex tool chain features and their dependencies, with the ultimate goal of making your qualification project as simple and as automated as possible. In this week’s episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains why the way you model your tool chain matters and how the TCA is usually used for safety-relevant projects, but also shares news about the TCA features that are currently in development at Validas.

Have you been thinking about creating a tool qualification roadmap for your own software? It all starts with the tool qualification workshop! This week, Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains what you can expect at a workshop: who should participate, what topics are covered, how long it takes, and what it will result in.

In this week’s episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch takes us on a journey through the tool qualification roadmap — where do you start when you want to ensure your software is safe to use, which parts of the project are crucial, and how does Validas approach the safety analysis of new software? Learn all that and much more by joining us through the Tool and Library Qualification podcast!

In this episode we tackle TD, or tool detection, the process of determining how likely it is that potential errors in software tools will be detected. Tune in to learn how TD is used to reach a tool confidence level (TCL), the details of how it is determined, whose responsibility it is to investigate TD levels, and why some of these levels might lead to more reliable software than others.

When using a software tool or compiler in a safety-relevant project, it’s important to be confident in its results — using the ISO 26262 safety standard, we call this reliability the tool confidence level (TCL). In this episode, Oscar explains how TCL classes are determined and how they affect the tool usage, why you wouldn’t want the lowest TCL for your product, and where TCL classification might be more trouble than expected.

After our Whit Monday break, this week we tackle the hefty topic of safety standards! Join Dr. Oscar Slotosch as he leads you through the usage of safety standards and their application to the development of different types of software, as well as the difficult questions of what is an acceptable risk and how we should think about the safety of new technologies.

Tool users, tool providers, safety experts, and developers — what role do they have in the qualification processes and whose responsibility is it to ensure a tool is safe? If you’ve ever been puzzled by this nomenclature, join us in this week’s episode, in which Dr. Oscar Slotosch breaks down the crucial roles involved in qualification and shares his insights on their importance.

Join us in this week’s episode to learn about all the qualification processes necessary for a good tool or library qualification. Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the ins and outs of a standard qualification, the preparation that comes before qualification, and how building QKits just might increase the quality of your projects!

In our third episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains why tools need to be classified before they are qualified, where the classification rules are determined, and which class you really want your tools to be in. Join us to learn how to perform a classification, how to wrangle error mitigations, and why classes in avionics hold extra weight!

In our second episode, we set the stage and define all the topics crucial in the business of qualification: tools, libraries, safety standards, classification, and qualification itself. What methods can you use to claim a tool or library is safe and where do the most obscure problems always pop up? Join us to find out!

In our first podcast episode, we introduce the topic of tool qualification — the main area of expertise of both Validas and our host, Dr. Oscar Slotosch. Why do we qualify tools, when did we start paying attention to tool safety, and how difficult of a task is it to ensure human life isn’t put in danger by unreliable software? Learn about all that and much more in our Tool and Library Qualification podcast!

As experts in the creation of safe software systems, in this podcast hosted by Dr. Oscar Slotosch we answer all the questions in the field of tool and library qualification. Each episode guides you through a crucial topic via discussions, interpretations, and examples given by safety professionals in Validas and beyond, and there’s something for everyone — from specialists to beginners!