Verocel – The Evolution of Life Cycle Traceability

 

Coordinating and delivering traceability and artifact evidence materials for certification criteria, for example DO-178B Level A, is as formidable a task as producing the materials themselves.  Verocel has developed innovative and powerful tools that automate these tasks and processes, optimizing the maintenance of requirements and generation of life cycle traceability data by orders of magnitude.

 

In the Beginning…

 

Prior to forming Verocel, our management team worked for a compiler development company that needed versions of its embedded real-time operating systems (RTOSs) certifiable to DO-178B Level A for use on commercial aircraft systems.

 

The volume of evidence required for safety critical software certification of these RTOSs to DO-178B Level A filled a number of file cabinets.  Much of the life cycle data, including requirement reviews, artifact reviews, and bug reports, were filled out by hand.  And, despite the fact other aspects of life cycle data were produced on computers, all life cycle data was printed out and physically stored in ‘Software Development Folders’ (SDFs).  For some DO-178B Level A systems, projects assembled 35 pounds of paper for every thousand lines of source code.  A full compliance audit could take weeks, as auditors manually cross-referenced requirements, life cycle data files, and artifacts in SDFs.

 

 

 

A sample portion of the documentation evidence for traceability

 

 

Life Cycle Data Delivered on CD-ROM

 

After making a single delivery to one customer that contained 980 lbs. of paper for two copies of the certification life cycle data for three different systems, future Verocel managers decided to find a way to deliver the life cycle data in electronic form.  CD-ROM was the obvious choice.  The physical organization of the life cycle data was logically reproduced in folders on a CD-ROM.  The delivery was, essentially, an electronic file cabinet with only a hardcopy master index.  This index contained many matrices sorted by requirement, source file, and test file that specified the location of the corresponding life cycle evidence on the CD-ROM.  For auditors, lookup time was somewhat reduced, but it was still a manual process of going to the right location to find the necessary artifact.

 

Today, some companies still deliver their certification life cycle data this way.

 

Life Cycle Data and Traceability Delivered on CD-ROM

 

Still prior to Verocel, the team took the first steps toward automating the delivery of traceability information and life cycle data on CD-ROM.  A number of complicated and fragile Microsoft Word Visual Basic macros were written that added hyperlinks to online copies of the many sorted index matrices like those previously delivered, to provide a semblance of traceability.  Still, the traceability was not complete, nor was it cross-referenced beyond the delivered matrices.

 

Today some companies deliver their limited life cycle traceability data in the proprietary formats of the requirement-gathering tools used to create the data.  This means their customer and the auditors must have access to these proprietary tools in order to view the traceability.

 

Verocel’s Launch Delivers Far Reaching Technology for Traceability

 

The goal of Verocel's founders was to devise a way to fully automate the capture of requirements and life cycle traceability data, and automate its delivery.  If a non-proprietary virtual library could be created on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM where all project data was linked and cross-referenced, access to this data during compliance audits would be as simple as browsing a web site.  The advent of XML technology allowed Verocel engineering to develop VeroTrace, a requirements and life cycle data traceability management tool that allows you to produce, manage, and deliver all the data that supports software certification/approval; and VeroStyle, a tool that renders (creates) documents from XML data.

 

VeroTrace provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to a requirements traceability database where you can add, modify, delete, query, track review states, perform online reviews, extract artifacts from Configuration Management (CM), generate review checklists, and generate XML files that provide the basis of traceability between the artifacts of certification evidence.  Traceability is available in all directions at all levels.  Here is a screenshot of an example of traceability by requirement.  Note how access is provided by hyperlinks to all pertinent artifacts:

 

 

 

Click here to view the entire Life Cycle Data Traceability Demo.

 

 

VeroTrace and its supporting tools have a far-reaching impact on the way development engineers and quality assurance personnel produce, maintain, and deliver certification evidence for software requirements, artifacts, and life cycle traceability.  These tools also have an enormous impact on the task of certification/approval auditors by greatly simplifying access to all life cycle data.