Compilers are critical tools when building software for safety-critical purposes. Usually, they cannot be completely mitigated and require thorough special care. Validas qualified many compilers. This was often done with Qualification Kits (QKits). The intention of a QKit is to ship and automate the qualification process and generate standard compliant documentation to prove that the qualified compiler can be used in a safety-critical project. The advantage of this approach is that it can be deployed to third parties and the used compiler can then be qualified in this environment.

For customers, who use a third-party compiler or an open-source compiler as gcc, g++ or clang in their productive environment, without available Qkit, building a QKit is not always the most cost-effective option, especially if a CI environment for building the software is already available. For these cases, Validas offers the Assisted Compiler Qualification Approach.

For a successful compiler qualification according to a safety standard, such as ISO26262 or IEC61508, the configuration needs to be fixed during the qualification. Validas will help you with that by performing a detailed analysis with you, that will include for example Known Bug Analysis according to safety norm. Many safety concerns when using a compiler can also be mitigated, for example by having a development process according to the corresponding safety norm with coding guidelines, code reviews or static analysis. Validas uses your development process and integrates that into your safety argumentation to decrease the qualification efforts. To facilitate and automate testing, Validas will assist you with the automation of test execution in your CI environment or build environment. So test cases can be easily re-executed for regression checks on your infrastructure or investigating changes in compiler versions or compiler flags. Validas has qualified compilers with the test suite SuperTest by SolidSands. Should the acquisition of SuperTest take time, Validas also provides a test package to prepare your infrastructure. After the test execution, Validas will analyze the test results for a successful qualification. When the necessary steps are performed, standard-compliant documentation is created. Before finalizing the documents, Validas performs a review with you to ensure that the documentents are correct. Additional steps, when using the tool may be needed to assure safety. We will ensure together that they are understood and can be implemented by your team. The finalized documentation can be used for a certification process by a certification agency of your choice (e.g. TÜV Süd).

The advantages of this approach are:

• Assistance with setup and running of test cases
• No effort for Test Analysis on the customer side
• Creation of standard-compliant documentation
• Handling of Certification Process by Validas