If you’re working with code and/or involved with embedded system development, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the LDRA tool suite. Just this week, the company announced an enhancement to those tools, significant enough to call it “version 9.5.” The updates let designers automate a process that had previous been a manual one and also provide simple, easy-to-use visibility into the relationships between software artifacts at all stages of the software development life cycle, from requirements through verification.

Such tools become key for companies designing safety- and security-critical software. The industries that are candidates include aerospace and defense, medical devices, industrial controls, rail transportation, and automotive.

When you combine the facts that safety-critical systems have become so dependent on software, and that software has grown dramatically so much in size and complexity, tools like the LDRA suite become more essential than ever.

Included in the updates Linux support, so users can conduct complete Linux dependency checks to ensure comprehensive analysis despite the many variants between target Linux OS and their libraries; unit testing, meaning that enhancements to file and class views improve users’ ability to look at coverage analysis from different perspectives; simplified test case creation and execution, including point and click for test case creation; and flow graphs, which let users aggregate flow graphs from multiple test cases to see how their system reacted differently to each test case.