Tool and Library Qualification

In this episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch introduces a special offer from Validas: the First Quick Qualification. If you like to read more about it, you can listen to our new episode and visit our webpage: https://www.validas.de/en/services/fqq/ and If you like to get your First Quick Qualification, you can already plan your Kickoff meeting with Oscar: ⁠Book time to meet with me⁠ We can be reached through ⁠⁠podcast@validas.de⁠⁠ and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at ⁠⁠validas.de⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠podcast⁠⁠.

In this episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch introduces a special offer from Validas: the Tool Readiness Check, which is available for free to its customers. If you like to read more about it, visit our webpage: https://www.validas.de/en/services/tool_readiness_check/ and If you like to get your free tool readiness check, you can already plan your tool readiness check Kickoff meeting with Oscar: Book time to meet with me We can be reached through ⁠podcast@validas.de⁠ and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at ⁠validas.de⁠ and ⁠podcast⁠.

In this special episode, our host Dr. Oscar Slotosch is joined by Marcel Ropos, a security expert from Validas. They will be discussing the famous XZ-attack and its implications for security. We can be reached through ⁠⁠podcast@validas.de⁠⁠ and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at ⁠⁠validas.de⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠podcast⁠⁠.

In this special Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch and our special guest Masoud Asadzadeh discuss about time profiling in library qualification. Masoud has recently joined Validas and will tell has about his past and current experience in time profiling! if you are interested in the topic tune in! We can be reached through ⁠podcast@validas.de⁠ and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at ⁠validas.de⁠ and ⁠podcast⁠.

In this episode we will learn from Dr. Oscar Slotosch about Function based library qualification and why Validas usually chooses this method among others library qualification approaches! Tune in! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In this special Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will enjoy the company of a special guest: Florian Grigoleit. During this pleasant chat with Oscar, Florian will share with us his experience as safety engineer and founder of Modelwise! Tune in! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

After a break we are back with our episode number 14 of our second season! Today Dr. Oscar Slotosch will tell us about tool confidence, and how this relates to our toolchain modeling! Don't miss it, and tune in to know more! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In this special Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will enjoy the company of a special guest: Benjamin Flach. Banjamin is the AUTOSAR expert at Validas, and during this pleasant chat with Oscar, he will get us into the world of AUTOSAR and its qualification. Tune in to discover more! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

This episode is a follow up of episode 38, where we will learn from Dr. Oscar Slotosch even more details about Validas' Process models and Process modeling tool (PMT), and why is this tool essential in the Validas' qualification processes! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In our Episode 11 Dr. Oscar Slotosch will discuss the choice of colors in the Validas' Tool chain Analyzer (TCA). Nothing can be left to chance, tune in to know more about why colors are important! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In today's Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will talk about traceabilty in Tool Qualification. We will hear why we can't give up on traceabilty in tools and libraries qualification, and how TCA can support in keeping traceability always under control. Tune in! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In our new Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch is going to discuss how to handle findings when testing tools&libraries. And we will hear about interesting findings examples he has encountered during his career. Tune in! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In Today's Episode we will hear about English for safety experts. In general, but especially in a legal context also nuances in the language can be very important to best interpret safety standards. Dr. Oscar Slotosch will share with us some tips in this regard. Tune in to know more! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast. As promised, here the link to our Episode about TCA-SW.

In today’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will tell us about a new exciting challenge for Validas: building and maintaining a new growing Qualification Kit to support the IBM engineering Tool Suite. How do Validas together with IBM have planned to make this a successful project? tune in to discover the details! We can be reached through podcast@validas.deand all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In our new episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will discuss Tool Qualification in IEC 61508. A safety standard that he uses to define as mother of all standards. If you want to know why, and learn many other interesting details about IEC61508, just tune in! We can be reached through podcast@validas.deand all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In today’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will give us an overview about safety conferences. He will tell us about his experience as chairman and speaker at the 2021 online conference on automotive ISO 26262 functional safety, and will give us some exciting news about other coming conferences. Tune in! And, as mentioned in the episode, here is the link to our episode 42 with Dr. Daniel Kästner! We can be reached through podcast@validas.deand all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

How and when the amount of work required to qualify our tools can be significatively reduced? If you want to learn about this, tune in and discover the tips and tricks of Dr. Oscar Slotosch to make our life easier in qualifying and not-qualifying our tools! We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

In today’s episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch will give an overview of the DDO-330, a safety standard originally developed in the avionics domain. DO-330 was, in fact, built for the qualification of avionics software, but is today a stand-alone standard focused on tool-qualification, and can be of great support also in other fields. To know more tune in to our new episode! We can be reached through podcast@validas.deand all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

Known bugs are one of the main concepts in safety. Most of the big software projects maintain a list of known bugs. Why are they so important and how can we handle them? In this Episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch will discuss about this and much more. Including how known bugs are integrated and modeled within the Tool Chain Analyser (TCA) at Validas. Additionally, as promised we post here the link to our Episode 13, if you like to know more details about Certifications. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas and our podcast can be found on our website respectively at validas.de and podcast.

How can Validas’ team generate arbitrary documentation fast end efficiently? In our first episode of the second season Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the Configurable Report Generator, a new smart tool, developed within the TCA-SW, to document how tools, libraries and software comply with safety standards! Tune in to learn more. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de

In this final episode of the first season of our podcast, Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses Validas’s Tool Chain Analyzer for Software (TCA-SW), which contains the automated document generation and visual representations that can help you effectively ‘re-engineer’ your projects with safety as a priority. Tune in to learn about the intricacies of the TCA-SW and the differences and similarities in the approach Validas takes to analyze tools and libraries using their Tool Chain Analyzer. If you would like to see the TCA in practice, we invite you to watch our video demonstration on the HUBCAP platform, and if you would like to listen to some of our earlier episodes, join us in Episode 11: Tool Chain Analyzer, Episode 41: Validas’s Generic Safety Plan, or Episode 21: How to Save Money by Tool Qualification. Your producer and friendly representative of the audience in this episode has been Ivana Kurecic. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

In this short question episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch introduces Validas’s growing QKit — a qualification kit that contains as few or as many components as you need, and that grows and expands with the size of your project. If you would like to listen to another one of our episodes, we can recommend Episode 41: Validas’s Generic Safety Plan or another one of our short question episodes: Question 04: Do famous tools need to be qualified? and Question 05: What do we mean by high probability in tool qualification? The full list of Validas products can be found here. Your producer and friendly representative of the audience in this episode has been Ivana Kurecic. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch is joined by Dr. Daniel Kästner, co-founder of AbsInt and accomplished expert on safety-critical embedded systems, for a discussion of the applications of static analysis to safety-critical software and the advanced development tools offered by AbsInt. Tune in to learn about the static code analyzer for C and C++ that can prove the absence of runtime errors and invalid concurrent behavior (Astrée) and AbsInt’s formally verified production compiler (CompCert), as well as their process of development and real-world applications. Additional information about AbsInt can be found at absint.com. To hear Oscar’s discussion with Marcel Beemster, join us in Episode 20: SuperTest with Marcel Beemster (Solid Sands), and to learn more about C++ exceptions for safety-critical projects, listen in to Episode 31: Safety of C++ Exceptions — Deep Dive with Mapless AI. Your producer and friendly representative of the audience in this episode has been Ivana Kurecic. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

What does it mean to validate a tool, and what to verify it — and where do we find these terms in tool qualification prescribed by the ISO 26262 safety standard? In this short question episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch clarifies common misunderstandings and explains when it is appropriate to perform a code review, and when a tool should be tested. To learn more about how tool validation is used in practice, join us in our Episode 20: SuperTest with Marcel Beemster (Solid Sands), to hear more customer experiences from Validas’s Robert Reitmeier, tune in to Episode 24: Tool Chain Modeling with Robert Reitmeier, and if you would like to listen to another one of our short question episodes, we can recommend Question 05: What do we mean by high probability in tool qualification? We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de

To make the process of building safe products more efficient and reliable, Validas has developed a generic safety plan for software and safety elements out of context (SEOOC), which has the added benefit of generating all the required ISO documents automatically from its model. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch presents the generic safety plan and explains how it can be used to speed up the creation of safety cases — for a variety of safety standards and projects. The full list of Validas’s innovative products can be found on our website. If you would like to learn more about the topics Oscar discusses in this episode, join us in some of our previous episodes, such as Episode 11: Tool Chain Analyzer, Episode 36: Safety Element out of Context — SEooc, Episode 16: Library Qualification, or Episode 30: Process Modeling Tool. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de

In the development of modern medical procedures and devices, and especially those that directly affect a person’s health, the safety of software tools needs to be paramount. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch shares his insights into the topic of qualification for medical devices, including the current requirements and processes defined by safety standards and governmental agencies, as well as the future developments we can expect in the field of medical tools. A short summary of the discussed safety standards for the medical field can be found here (in German), and an example of the tool qualification programs supported by the FDA can be accessed on this webpage. For a salient example of the importance of tool qualification for medical applications, listen to our previous discussion in Episode 39: Excel and COVID-19 Tool Safety, and if you would like to learn about how qualified tools can improve your projects, join us in Episode 21: How to Save Money by Tool Qualification. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de

To have high confidence in a qualified tool, we should be able to detect its potential errors with a high probability. This condition is commonplace within safety standards, but what does high probability mean in practice? In this short question episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains how high probability of error detection should — or shouldn’t — be measured and how we can achieve it in tool qualification. If you would like to learn more about the role of confidence in tool qualification, listen to our Episode 19: Confidence, to learn about responsible argumentation practices, join us in Episode 14: Qualification Documents, and for another short question episode, tune in to Question 03: How can we detect whether we are using a qualified tool? We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de

Tool safety is not crucial just for the production of physical parts and mechanical devices, but it has also had an important role in the monitoring of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch responds to the recent news of the English government losing thousands of data entries by their unsafe use of Microsoft Excel, which may have caused irreversible damage to the contact tracing and pandemic containment efforts in the United Kingdom. This oversight has been covered by the BBC, in news articles discussing the mismanagement of Excel data and its consequences. If you enjoyed this episode, we can recommend our previously published Episode 18: Tool Safety Manual, Question 04: Do famous tools need to be qualified?, and Episode 21: How to Save Money by Tool Qualification. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

As a key technique in any large-scale project, process modeling also has a role in qualification — but the right process modeling tool can provide you with more advantages than you would expect. Join Dr. Oscar Slotosch in this episode to learn about the process modeling technology (PMT) used by Validas, the design that went into its creation, and the features Validas experts use to simplify tool and library qualification projects. Further information and free download packages of Validas’s certified PMT can be found here. If you would like to find out more about process modeling tools used for qualification, join us in Episode 30: Process Modeling Tool, and to learn about the research and development efforts at Validas, listen to one of our older episodes, Episode 24: Tool Chain Modeling with Robert Reitmeier, Episode 28: ForeC++ — Test Case Generator, or Episode 22: Validas — a Conversation between Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Dr. Peter Braun. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

MCDC is a ubiquitous technique used in software testing, but the tools that test it must also be appropriately qualified. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch gives an overview of this code coverage criterion, explains its history and development, and shares his experiences with its advantages and disadvantages for tool qualification. You can find an in-depth description of MCDC in the article Oscar mentions in this episode, and you can learn more about the topic of code coverage in one of our previous episodes, Episode 26: Code Coverage in Qualification. We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

In this week’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch takes you on a deep dive into the Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) — a crucial construct that is defined in the ISO 26262 safety standard. Join us to learn why the SEooC is an important concept for qualification of tools and libraries, why its use can be a great advantage, and whether it should be the provider or the integrator to qualify it. Our previously published episodes can serve as a practical guide into the elements defined in the ISO 26262 safety standard, tune in to learn more in Episode 33: ISO 26262, Episode 06: Safety Standards, Episode 35: Tool Confidence — Revisited, and our short Question 01: Did ISO 26262 abolish tool qualification in its second edition? We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch revisits the topic of tool confidence, clears misunderstandings, and explains the details of how tool confidence level (TCL) should be taken from the ISO 26262 safety standard into practice. For more information on TCL, listen to our discussions in Episode 07: Tool Confidence Level and Episode 19: Confidence, to learn about the crucial modeling tool used at Validas, join us in Episode 11: Tool Chain Analyzer, and for an in-depth explanation of validation, tune in to Episode 20: SuperTest with Marcel Beemster (Solid Sands) or watch Oscar’s recent talk titled Safety Plan for the Linux Validation Kit. If you would like to learn more about the ISO 26262 safety standard, join us in one of our older episodes, Episode 33: ISO 26262 and Question 01: Did ISO 26262 abolish tool qualification in its second edition? We can be reached through podcast@validas.de and all information about Validas can be found on our website, validas.de.

The process by which tools can have an impact on the safety of your project is not always straightforward or easy to understand. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch devotes special attention to the ways in which tools can introduce or overlook errors and how we can determine their overall impact. Listen in for a summary of tool impact requirements and recommendations across different safety standards and models — including Oscar’s own experiences with special cases, such as model checkers and timing analysis tools. For an introduction to Validas’s model-based approach to tool safety, join us in Episode 11: Tool Chain Analyzer, and to learn about the importance of tool impact in more practical cases, listen to our Episode 09: Tool Qualification Roadmap.

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch brings you an introduction to ISO 26262, the crucial safety standard used in the automotive industry — and one of Oscar’s fields of expertise. Join us to understand the purpose and role of ISO 26262, but also to learn about the concepts of the Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), the Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), and the Safety Element out of Context (SEooC). Whether you are new to safety standards or curious about the minute changes in the revised version of ISO 26262, this episode has something for you. You can find the ISO 26262 standard here and learn details about IEC 61508, which Oscar calls the mother of all safety standards, here. If you would like to learn more about safety standards, join us in our Episode 06: Safety Standards, if you would like to hear about the details of the ISO 26262 safety standard, listen to Question 01: Did ISO 26262 abolish tool qualification in its second edition? and Episode 07: Tool Confidence Level, or join us for Oscar’s interview with Dr. Philipp Robbel, in Episode 31: Safety of C++ Exceptions — Deep Dive with Mapless AI.

Do all tools need to be qualified, or can we simply trust the famous ones that have been used successfully in thousands of different environments? Tune in to our fourth short question episode to learn from Dr. Oscar Slotosch about why even famous tools need to be treated with care and where computer bugs really come from. For an introduction to qualification, listen to our Episode 01: Why Tool Qualification? and Episode 12: Qualification Test Strategies, and if you would like to join us for another question episode, tune in to Question 03: How can we detect whether we are using a qualified tool?

Effective mitigation measures, which have been introduced in part 7.4.4.8 of the second edition of the IEC 61508 standard, are crucial to efficient safety planning — but to construct an effective mitigation strategy, we first need to understand its precise definition in relevant safety standards and what the use of mitigations means for its required workload. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch shares his experience with successful mitigation strategies, discusses Validas’s automated approach to mitigation planning, and explains what effective mitigation really means in practice. To learn more about existing safety standards and how to adhere to them, listen to our Episode 06: Safety Standards and Episode 29: Safety Compliance, and if you would like to discover details on Validas’s approach to modeling for safety-relevant projects, join us in Episode 11: Tool Chain Analyzer.

This episode brings you a special discussion of C++ exceptions, in which Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Jakob Riedle of Validas joined forces with Dr. Philipp Robbel, Principal of Mapless AI, an up-and-coming company conducting research in applied artificial intelligence and autonomous system safety. Tune in to learn about the way C++ exceptions are handled in safety-critical projects, which requirements common safety standards have for their use, and how Mapless AI integrates exceptions in their projects — creating safe autonomy that doesn’t rely on maps. If you would like to contact Philipp or learn more about his work, visit Mapless.AI. To hear Oscar’s earlier discussion on C++ with Jakob, listen to our Episode 28: ForeC++ — Test Case Generator, and to learn more about C and C++ compilers, join us in Episode 20: SuperTest with Marcel Beemster (Solid Sands).

One of the most useful results of Validas’s research projects is PMT, the Process Modeling Tool used to fully model and manage safety-relevant processes at Validas. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch talks about the development and implementation of some of its most useful features — from the ability to graphically depict a project’s safety plan, to its automated ticket generation. To freely access and use this tool for your own projects, visit Validas’s PMT webpage, and to learn more about its application within the Linux Validation Kit, enjoy a recording of Oscar’s talk: Safety Plan for Linux Validation Kit. For an interesting discussion on research projects that are currently being developed at Validas, listed to some of our previous episodes, Episode 22: Validas — a Conversation between Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Dr. Peter Braunand Episode 28: ForeC++ — Test Case Generator.

In this week’s episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the details of safety compliance and its role in safety-relevant software projects. Join us to learn what safety standards require in terms of compliance, what is meant by safety integrity, why compliance reports should always be included your projects, and what procedure Validas uses to ensure compliance — efficiently and reliably. In Episode 30 we will talk about the Validas Process Modeling Tool (PMT) and its role in safety compliance argumentation, but until then you can brush up on the basics by listening to our Episode 04: Qualification Processes and Episode 06: Safety Standards.

To successfully test a tool or a library, especially in safety-relevant projects, it is crucial to test for all important cases; in some situations, this can become increasingly difficult to do without automation. In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the usage and purpose of test case generators with Jakob Riedle, who has spent the past two years developing ForeC++ — Validas’s own test case generator. Join us to learn about the biggest challenges in creating a test case generator, how these tools can help you comply with safety standards, and what Jakob has done to develop ForeC++ to its current form. If you would like to learn more about the intricacies of test strategies, listen to our Episode 12: Qualification Test Strategies, and to explore more exciting projects at Validas, listen to Episode 22: Validas — a Conversation between Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Dr. Peter Braun.

After a crucial introduction to the role of code coverage in qualification, in our Episode 26, Dr. Oscar Slotosch gives an in-depth analysis of the methods, procedures, and pitfalls in the qualification of compilers. Join us to learn which properties of compilers make them so difficult to qualify, why source code coverage doesn’t provide a sufficient argument for qualification, where it is likely to find flows in existing test strategies for compiler qualification — and how Validas approaches these complex problems. To hear Oscar’s conversation with Marcel Beemster about compiler qualification strategies, listen to Episode 20: SuperTest with Marcel Beemster (Solid Sands), for a refresher on qualification test strategies, join us in our Episode 12: Qualification Test Strategies, and to check out the Arm functional safety C library Oscar mentioned as a great example of a qualified library within a qualified compiler, click here. If you are wondering whether non-deterministic compilers can also be qualified, we have answered that question for you in one of our short episodes: Question 02: Can a non-deterministic compiler be qualified?

In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch discusses the role of code coverage in the qualification of tools and libraries. Tune in to learn about how code coverage is applied in a safety analysis, the importance of the modified condition/decision coverage (MCDC) criterion in software testing, and why code coverage analysis is strongly recommended, but almost never required by modern safety standards. To learn more about the applications of code coverage in qualification, listen to our Episode 27: Compiler Qualification, where we showcase an in-depth analysis of the methods, procedures, and pitfalls in the qualification of compilers.

Despite the restrictions imposed by the ongoing global pandemic, the work at Validas continues — even if it is from home — and this includes our podcast. In this episode we return to the basics to discuss qualification kits and, in particular, Validas’s own QKit. Join us to learn how the first instance of QKit was developed, which features of a qualification kit are useful for a customer, and how you can recognize a bad one. For more insight into qualification kits, listen to some of our previous episodes: Episode 12: Qualification Test Strategies and Episode 15: What Is a Good QKit?

To expand on our last episode, in which we discussed tool chains, Dr. Oscar Slotosch talks to Robert Reitmeier — Validas’s own expert on tool chain modeling. In this episode Robert explains each step of the process of tool chain modeling for safety-relevant projects, shares tips on how to use Validas’s Tool Chain Analyzer to its full power, and reveals what new features his team is soon hoping to develop. To learn about the role of tool chain analysis, listen to Episode 23: Tool Chains, and to find out more about Validas’s tool chain analysis software, listen to Episode 11: Tool Chain Analyzer.

Tool chains are more than just sets of interconnected tools — in a safety analysis, they are often the crucial component, albeit not one that is trivial to manage. In this episode we discuss why we should be paying attention to tool chains when building a software project, how tool chains should be documented, and what requirements safety standards impose on their definition. In our next episode we explore the practical matters in tool chain modeling with Validas’s own Robert Reitmeier — give it a listen at Episode 24: Tool Chain Modeling with Robert Reitmeier.

If you have been listening to our podcast, you might have wondered about Validas — the types of projects we work on and the mission of Validas in the world of tool and library qualification. You’re in luck; the two CEOs of Validas, Dr. Oscar Slotosch and Dr. Peter Braun, have come together to discuss the successes and challenges of their company, the types of customers they work with, their favorite research projects, and the future of Validas itself. To learn more about why we do what we do, listen to our first episode, Episode 01: Why Tool Qualification?

In safety-relevant projects, you either need to mitigate for potential errors each time you interact with a tool or you need to qualify it — but can tool qualification save you money? In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains how to correctly evaluate whether all the cost and effort put toward mitigation can be lessened by a well thought out tool qualification, and how to find out if you could be saving money by using qualified tools. To learn more about tool qualification and why it matters, listen to our overview episode: Episode 01: Why Tool Qualification?

In this episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch sat down for a conversation with Marcel Beemster, the CTO of Solid Sands— the one-stop-shop for C and C++ compiler and library testing, validation, and safety services. They discuss all the things that can go wrong with a compiler, where the biggest challenges in compiler use come from, and how Marcel and his team use the Solid Sands’ SuperTest validation suite. Tune in to learn about compiler development and testing from Oscar and Marcel. More information on Solid Sands and SuperTest can be found on https://solidsands.com/supertest. For an in-depth look at the qualification strategies for compilers and the use of code coverage in qualification argumentation, listen to two of our newer episodes: Episode 26: Code Coverage in Qualification and Episode 27: Compiler Qualification.

What is confidence in the safety of tools and libraries, and how do you buy or create it for your own products? Within safety standards, confidence is a clearly defined technical term, but it relies on subjective evaluation — so how can you be confident in the safety of the tools you use? In this episode Dr. Oscar Slotosch explains the importance of confidence for safety-critical projects and reflects on the focus recent safety standards have begun to give it. To learn more about how confidence is determined, listen to Episode 07: Tool Confidence Level, and to explore the details of how safety standards define confidence, check out Episode 06: Safety Standards.

How can you tell if the tool you are using has been qualified? Tune in to our third bonus question episode with Dr. Oscar Slotosch to find out how this complicated question can have a simple answer. To learn about tool qualification in general, listen to our full-length episode in which we discuss the basics: Episode 01: Why Tool Qualification?

In this week’s episode, Dr. Oscar Slotosch explores the importance of the Tool Safety Manual — an essential part of qualification documentation and the only resource the end user has to help them use a tool safely. Learn how tool safety manuals are created and how you can use them responsibly, but also what it is that makes a tool safety manual good. At the end of this episode, Oscar announces a special project: Validas’s online database of good tool qualification kits. To learn more about the documents used with a well-qualified tool, listen to our Episode 14: Qualification Documents.