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Products

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TBmanager®

Collaborative, requirements-based development and verification

The engineering justification for the processes outlined in the functional safety and cybersecurity standards is clear. They represent the logical, progressive application of best practices along with the collation of evidence that those practices have been correctly applied.

However, it is also clear that those standards call for many artefacts to be collated, cross-referenced and tracked. Ensuring that they are permanently up to date can be a logistical nightmare in the face of changing customer requirements, failed tests and engineering oversights. Supporting that project management overhead by means of automation can make that process both more effective, and much less time consuming.

What is TBmanager?

TBmanager® is a component of the LDRA tool suite®. It provides a task-based interface to the validation and verification components of the tool suite, and to third-party tools. It creates a common user experience across the development team for complete workflow management, linking requirements, design, source code, tests, analyses, and associated artefacts within the software development lifecycle. 

By integrating requirements management, ALM and development tools with the LDRA tool suite, TBmanager provides the bidirectional traceability and impact analysis features to maintain control of project compliance with functional safety and cybersecurity standards while reducing development cost, risk, and time-to-market. 

How does TBmanager support functional safety and cybersecurity standards compliance?

TBmanager provides a flexible and user-friendly mechanism to automate bidirectional traceability between standards objectives, requirements, design documents, source code, tests, and associated artefacts within the project verification workflow. 

An automatically generated Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) relates each high-level requirement to the completed software product and its development and verification artefacts and communicates the project status to the requirements management tool of choice.

End-to-end traceability is illustrated graphically, allowing analysts and project managers to see a complete picture of traceability. Allocated requirements and the output from verification activities are visible to appropriate team members, test results are recorded, and the impact of any changes is flagged.

How does TBmanager maintain bidirectional traceability?

Traceability is referenced throughout many functional safety and cybersecurity standards.  

It is easy to mistake the notion of traceability as a one-way street, assuming that if the requirements are all shown to be implemented and tested in the code, then the objective of the standard is satisfied. However, it is just as important to show that there is code present that satisfies no requirements. Such code may be the result of feature creep, of code that was created before an alternative implementation was selected, or even of a deliberately implanted “back door” method added by the unscrupulous. In any event, providing evidence that there is no such code is important.  

In theory, bidirectional traceability is easy to achieve. But issues and problems inevitably arise, and traceability between all project phases can become challenging to achieve. Automating that traceability and highlighting inconsistencies helps to address that challenge. 

Consider what happens if a software component implementation test fails.  

  • It may fail because there is a contradiction in the requirements. If that is the case, the requirements will need to change. But what other parts of the software are affected by that? 
  • It may fail because there is a coding error. If that is the case, then it will need to be corrected. But what other software units were dependent on the modified code? What if they were dependent on an incorrect output? 
  • It may fail because the requirements have an incorrect specification for the test parameters. That means a requirement change. But have there been unit tests which are compromised because these parameters were wrong? 

These scenarios can quickly lead to situations where the traceability between the products of software development fails. While it is possible to perform the tasks of maintaining it manually, automation is likely to help a great deal.  

How does TBmanager demonstrate compliance with standard objectives?

TBmanager supports bidirectional traceability not only of project requirements, but also of functional safety and standards objectives – including DO-178CISO 26262IEC 61508, ISO/SAE 21434, and many more. 

How does TBmanager interface to other LDRA tool suite components?

TBmanager interfaces automatically to the other LDRA tool suite componentsA drag-and-drop facility is accessible to the project administrator at configuration time.  

This configuration ensures that test artefacts relating to code review and coding standards compliancequality reviewunit test, and code coverage are automatically associated with the project requirements and standard objectives to which they relate.   

How does TBmanager interface to third party tools?

TBmanager leverages an appropriate TBmanager Integration Package (TIP) to support a wide variety of spread sheet, word processing documents, ALM solutions and PLM solutions including offerings from Microsoft, AtlassianIBM, PTC, Jama, Kovair, Siemens, SILKROAD, and Systemite.

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