CAPABILITY OF TODAY’S PROGRAM VERIFICATION: A PRACTICAL APPROACH FOR BETTER QUALITY AND RELIABILITY IN INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS

Software programs are an essential part of our everyday's life. Starting with large software programs on the PC, via complex control systems for the industrial area, to safety-critical software solutions for the automotive and aerospace industry; software is almost everywhere. Especially nowadays a high degree of reliability and security is essential. But due to the constantly growing size and complexity of such software programs the verification effort is increasing too. For this reasons, beneath dynamic testing and manual reviews, automatic verification methods became more and more popular. This paper deals with the expected benefits and the effectiveness of static code analysis and especially shows the limitations of this technique. Empirical tests have been developed and various code analysis tools employed. The paper discusses the obtained results. It becomes apparent that current code analysis tools can already find a variety of potential errors and weaknesses while critical cases are still undetected.