Legacy Software Migration
By Mark Pitchford
When code is born old: Architectural obsolescence within the development life cycle
Portability is not just relevant to software migration during the lifetime of a product. In complex military projects where the development cycle can easily take up to 10 years, software might have to be ported to new architectures two or three times. Unless specific steps are taken to ensure platform portability, such migration accelerates project overage, extending work schedules right through testing and verification. The ideal would be to anticipate such an occurrence and plan to minimize its impact, but the right software test tools can smooth the way even when porting legacy code written without such foresight.
Anticipating platform obsolescence
Choosing appropriate software test tools is always an essential step for safety-critical applications, and that is particularly true when portability is vital. It is well worth a little additional lateral thinking about how those tools might be applied to this specific circumstance.
The purpose of DO-178B is to provide guidelines for the production of software for airborne systems and equipment that performs its intended function while providing safety criticality. Although DO-178B demands the use of appropri- ate coding rules, it does not dictate what those rules should be.
Other standards, such as the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association C coding standard (MISRA C), MISRA C++, and Joint Strike Fighter Air Vehicle C++ Coding Standard (JSF++AV), spec- ify detailed rules about how such safety- critical code should be written, and are found in an increasingly broad spectrum of applications. For instance, MISRA C was initially developed for use in auto- motive applications but has since been adopted and used across a wide variety of industries, including the medical, rail, aerospace, and military sectors. Sure, standards such as DO-178B will insist on the use of a rule set such as the MISRA and JSF++AV standards. The problem is that although these all acknowledge
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www.VersaLogic.com/mam 14 March/April 2011 MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
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