Quick Review: LDRA Tool Suite

LDRA is an automated tool suite to test and verify embedded software for requirements traceability and compliance check against different standards. LDRA tool suite is developed by Liverpool Data Research Associates (LDRA).

Tool Capabilities

The tool suite provides multiple capabilities and services that include:

• Requirements Traceability,
• Test Management,
• Coding Standards Compliance,
• Code Quality Review,
• Code Coverage Analysis,
• Data-Flow and Control-Flow Analysis,
• Unit/Integration/Target testing,
• Certification and Regulatory support.

Industries served

Tool suite fulfills many objectives of different industries verticals which includes:

• Aerospace and Defense
• Medical
• Rail Transportation
• Automotive
• Industrial and Energy

Core components

Core components of LDRA Testsuite

Sr. No.	Component Name	Description
1.	LDRA Testbed	Helpful in the analysis of core static and dynamic analysis for embedded and host software. It provides compliance against different standards based on MISRA, JSF++ AV, CERT C, CWE, etc.
2.	TBvision	Helpful in achieving standards compliance, quality metrics, and code coverage analyses with help of LDRA Testbed
3.	TBrun	Helpful in running execution automatically for unit and integration testing
4.	TBmanager	Helpful in automating the whole traceability matrix between different project activities. standards objectives, requirements, design documents, source code, tests, and associated artifacts within the project verification workflow

LDRA Tool Suite

This section lists the features of the tool in a concise way.

Quality Report

The tool provides compliance against different quality metrics such as cyclometric complexity, Knots metric, Halstead complexity measures, etc. This report provides a clear picture of code quality and confirms the embedded software is maintainable and testable.

Automated Code Review (Both static and Dynamic)

No doubt, manual code review is best but it is very difficult to perform if your code base contains thousands of lines of code. In addition, the skill of the auditor is quite critical to reviewing code. LDRA tool suite performs automated code reviews that include both static and dynamic analysis of code against host and embedded software.

Compliance to standards

LDRA tool suite is very effective to check the quality of code against standards such as MISRA and CERT. Similarly, the LDRA tool suite is quite effective in overall enhancing the quality of IT products to a level where it is difficult to compromise.

Support to different languages

LDRA tool site supports different programming languages that include:

C

C++

Java

Ada95

Conclusion

LDRA test suite is definitely a gem while performing evaluations of big and complex projects. It is recommended to initiate and use of tool early in the product development life cycle.