The LDRA Group of companies is based around LDRA Ltd. which, founded in 1975, is the world's leading provider of automated source code analysis and testing tools.

LDRA is the market leader in providing automated software development and testing tools, as well as test solutions for a wide variety of market sectors. LDRA's products and services are at the leading edge of software testing technology. Many ground-breaking testing techniques have been derived from methodologies developed by LDRA. Through the deployment of LDRA's tools customers are able to deliver well constructed, documented and tested software and, in addition, benefit from significant time, cost and operational savings for their business.

Achieving Software Lifecycle Automation with the LDRA tool suite ^®
The LDRA tool suite is an integrated tool suite that can be utilised by an entire project team within the software development lifecycle, ranging from developers, QA managers, test engineers, project managers and maintenance/support engineers.

LDRA has developed its tool suite to assist with the 8 major tasks which need to be performed so that an organisation can achieve its software development and maintenance goals.  For more information on the individual components that make up the LDRA tool suite ^® ( Requirements Traceability, Design , Code & Quality Review , Unit Testing (eXtreme testing) , Target Testing , Test Verification and Test Manager ) and describes how they can be utilised throughout the software development lifecycle.

The LDRA tool suite ^®

LDRA Testbed®

At the heart of the LDRA tool suite is LDRA Testbed, providing the core static and dynamic analysis engines for both host and embedded software. LDRA Testbed enforces compliance with coding standards and provides clear visibility of software flaws that might typically pass through the standard build and test process to become latent problems. In addition, extensive test effectiveness feedback is provided through structural coverage analysis reporting facilities which support the requirements of the DO-178B standard up to and including Level-A.

TBvision®

TBvision presents code standard violations and software flaws in the context of the original source code. The interactive environment allows switching between reported violations; the original source code and any of the LDRA Testbed supported coding standards. In so doing TBvision clarifies to the user why an issue is being reported and what remedial action is required. In addition, software integrity can be measured and reported in terms of quality, security, or simply the presence of defects (including dynamic memory errors). TBvision presents the software flaws identified by static analysis from any of these perspectives and identifies the issues that need to be addressed to ensure that a software project meets its objectives.

TBrun®

TBrun is LDRA’s automated unit testing tool, providing a GUI driven interface for creating unit and module test cases for either host or target-based software. Test harnesses are automatically generated by TBrun, which also supports the creation of stubs for code that is outside the scope of the tests. Structural coverage analysis can also be included in the test harness, helping to ensure that the defined test cases execute 100% of the code under test. Formal test reports can be produced and, once generated, the test harnesses then serve as a regression test environment for future development phases.

TBreq®

For requirements driven projects TBreq supports the tracing of requirements through the entire software development lifecycle. High level requirements captured in standard office documents or third party RTM solutions, such as DOORS, IRQA or Requisite Pro can be traced through lower level documents to the code itself, and also to the associated verification activities and artifacts produced by the LDRA tool suite. The end result is a Requirements Traceability Matrix document that captures how each high level requirement was traced to the final software product, including the associated verification activities and results.

Embed-X™

This industry-first embedded application lifecycle management for critical systems coordinates software engineering by integrating project management, requirements management, architecture, coding, software configuration management and testing. ALM solutions automate and enforce processes between the stages of development, manage relationships between assets used or produced by the software, and offer transparency and metrics through reports on development as it progresses.

Additional Options

TBmisra®

TBmisra provides coding standards checking against MISRA-C:1998, MISRA-C:2004, MISRA C++:2008, JSF++ AV & VSOS and High Integrity C++.

TBsecure®

The TBvision plug-in TBsecure provides secure code standards checking against the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) CERT C secure coding standard and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) dictionary.

TBsafe®

TBsafe has a set of analysis tools to help rigorously test code to exacting standards such as those required for DO-178B, Def Stan 00-55 and IEC 61508. Features include Information Flow Analysis, Dynamic Data Flow Coverage, Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) for DO-178B Level A as well as Exact Semantic Analysis.

TBeXtreme®

TBeXtreme revolutionises unit testing by using the information gathered by LDRA Testbed to provide a totally automated solution. TBeXtreme eliminates the traditional time and resource problems associated with bottom-up testing.

TBobject Box®

TBobject Box provides an Object Code Verification capability, offering the only direct way to relate code coverage at the source code level with that achieved at the object code level. In addition to this the tool provides the mechanism to extend, where necessary, the code coverage at the assembler level.

TBevolve®

The TBvision plug-in TBevolve enables project teams to accurately monitor the impact of code changes on their testing process. As the source code changes TBevolve will compare a baseline copy of a system with new versions and will highlight changed source code lines and report on untested source code which affects the overall code coverage analysis.

TBpublish®

TBpublish captures the analysis and test results from the LDRA tool suite and publishes the results via an HTML index, into a self-contained directory for easy navigation and collaborative reference.

TBaudit®

TBaudit offers development and test managers an automatically generated, user-configurable Microsoft Word report which contains the results of the Review and Testing activities carried out by the development, QA and testing teams using the LDRA tool suite. TBpublish is a prerequisite for TBaudit.

Target Licence Package (TLP)

The Target Licence Package provides the right to use and to receive support for the LDRA tool suite when it is used for target testing. The TLP allows the user to receive assistance from LDRA in configuring the LDRA tool suite to interface with a specific embedded tool chain.

DO-178B Tool Qualification Support Packs

The LDRA tool suite falls under the category of ‘Software Verification Tool’ for DO-178B tool qualification purposes and the LDRA Tool Qualification Support Pack enables clients to follow a process which will provide the information required in order to qualify the LDRA tool suite.