Air Traffic Control Integrator

Challenge

This customer, an air traffic control system integrator, has a well-defined verification process following the traditional V-diagram model. Unfortunately, that process was becoming unaffordable due to the rising complexity of the software they develop. The firm wanted to lower the cost of their error detection and correction process. In a typical development program, this company’s functional-level software testing will reveal hundreds if not thousands of bugs. About one-third of those bugs will be undefined behaviors—pure coding errors that were not the result of errors in the requirements or software architecture. Bugs discovered during functional testing cost the company four times the effort required to correct them during the development phase. The subsequent step of their verification process, system testing, would typically yield about a third of the number of bugs discovered at the functional test level. Again, one-third of these are pure coding errors. Due to the ATC industry’s intense certification process, bugs discovered at the system level require four times the effort required to correct them during functional testing. That’s sixteen times the effort required to correct them during the development phase.