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Industrial Automation

Industrial Automation Software Solutions

Software Development & Testing for Industrial Automation

Functional safety standards such as IEC 61508 and its derivatives require organizations to prove that the software and safety requirements are met and fully tested. For over 30 years, Parasoft has been helping organizations follow such standards through required best practices like unit testing, test coverage, software metrics, traceability, and static code analysis with built-in support for MISRA, CERT, and other automation industry coding standards.

Address Today's Modern Software Development Challenges

Manage Increased Security Risks

Industrial automation systems (and the software that powers them) have become increasingly connected, no longer using private networks, but relying on the public Internet more and more to connect sensors to critical infrastructure control and back-end enterprise systems. The Internet, while enhancing the flexibility of the systems, has created an explosion of new threats and complexities. With any security holes in the control software, there is a risk of the gates being opened to a terrorist attack utilizing an unforeseen situation in the process. Parasoft C/C++ testing solutions provides the most comprehensive software testing solution for security on the market for security, so organizations can develop and release software with fewer risks.

Tackle the Growing Complexities of Modern Development and Connectivity

Multi-layered industrial Internet of things (IIoT) solutions require different technologies and tooling to implement and test the software for each layer. Low level sensors and actuators are most likely developed with C and C++, while upper layers are implemented with Java or C#. Connectivity adds complexity with multiple components using different protocols to propagate messages up to the end user. Parasoft provides testing tools to address each layer of complexity, seamlessly integrated with sophisticated reporting and analytics to help organizations manage this growing complexity.

Comply With IEC 61508 and Its Derivatives

For required levels of functional safety and security many organizations choose to develop their industrial automation systems in compliance with the IEC 61508 standard, which requires disciplined and rigorous software development and testing processes. Automated software testing tools from Parasoft reduce the cost of compliance with IEC 61508 by providing the automated tools needed for efficiently achieving compliance, along with a centralized reporting system that makes documentation efforts less manual.

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Parasoft Solutions for Industrial Automation

Parasoft’s integrated tool suite provides teams with a practical way to prevent, expose, and correct errors in order to ensure that their C and C++ code works as expected and complies with requirements. To promote rapid remediation, each problem detected is prioritized based on configurable severity assignments, automatically assigned to the developer who wrote the related code, and distributed to his or her IDE with direct links to the problematic code and a description of how to fix it. For embedded and cross-platform development, you can use C/C++test and C/C++test CT in both host-based and target-based code analysis and test flows.

Parasoft C/C++test and C/C++test CT helps industrial automation software development teams satisfy the software development and verification process requirements defined by the IEC 61508 standard. When results of the broad range of testing and code analysis types automated through C/C++test and C/C++test CT are processed, intelligent analytics are reported that significantly reduce the work required for software verification.

Benefit From the Parasoft Approach

Reduce the cost of developing high-quality software without sacrificing time to market.

Benefit From a Unified Tool With Multiple Testing Practices

Parasoft C/C++test satisfies multiple software testing requirements enumerated in IEC 61508. The comprehensiveness of the solution translates into lower learning and setup effort. Developers don’t have to learn several tools and can focus on their core activities. Tool integrators or architects save time otherwise spent implementing interfaces between tools to exchange data and generate uniform reports.

Use a Tool Architecture Suitable for Safety-Critical Applications

Parasoft C/C++ testing solutions are designed with safety-critical applications in mind. When performing unit testing or runtime memory monitoring, all components required to build the test binary, including the test cases for tested code, stimulation, and stubs are expressed in the form of the source code and can be versioned and inspected. By expressing all testing artifacts in the form of the source code, C/C++test ensures that the state of the memory before executing tests is constructed in the same way as in the production system.

Gain Efficiency With a Dedicated Qualification Kit for IEC 61508

Parasoft C/C++test is supported with a dedicated IEC 61508 qualification kit that complies with standard requirements for the tool qualification process. Instead of just providing qualification assistance in the form of the collection of test cases and templates for scripts and reports which require a lot of customization, Parasoft’s automated Qualification Support Tool guides users through all of the steps required to qualify the tool, and automates the majority of the tedious manual work required to qualify the tool. This includes executing the test cases from the exhaustive test suite provided, as well as generating the final reports required to document the qualification process. Parasoft C/C++test CT is in the process of TÜV SÜD certification and a Quality Kit is being developed.

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"Parasoft's solution is teaching us all to be better programmers. It helps us find errors that we didn't even realize were errors. Parasoft's solution has saved the Global Modeling and Analysis team both time and resources that we would have otherwise spent finding and fixing defects. Instead, we get to spend that time adding new features and functionality."

- Trane