Design verification through software architecture recovery : Meeting ISO 26262 requirements on software using static analysis

Emerging functional safety standards in the automotive industry will create new challenges for companies sitting on large deposits of legacy code. When refactoring existing code for compliance with standards such as ISO 26262, great savings could be made if work products required by the standard could be automatically generated from existing source code. In this thesis, we explore the possibilities to generate graphical software architectures, data-flow graphs and software architectural descriptions directly from existing C source code. By parsing the source code to find structures and the relations between them, we were able to create relational graphs that represents the software of an entire system or that of just one component, using different levels of abstraction where appropriate. We create a proof-of-concept tool chain that can generate two kinds of graphical architecture views and one data-flow view. Although these tools are by no means ready for production, they do show promise and are already useful as development tools for better software understanding. Finally we test the tool chain on current production ECU (Electric Control Unit) software used in heavy trucks and buses and evaluate the results against the requirements of the ISO 26262 standard. This thesis was done at Scania CV AB in Södertälje, Sweden