RISC-V 2021: Marcel Beemster: A Requirements based Test Suite for the C Standard Library: SuperGuard

Solid Sands has developed a requirement-based test suite for the C standard library, with traceability from individual test results to the requirements derived from the ISO C language specification. 

It is called SuperGuard and can be used to qualify C library implementations for safety-critical applications. The ISO C specification is not a list of requirements. From it, we distilled the requirements on the C library. This was a huge effort but required for library qualification. Next, we created test specifications and matched them with our existing test suite. 

Finally, tools were created to drive the test suite and report the test results so that they are fully traceable to the requirements and the specification. The C library is not insensitive to the application’s compilation options: many functions are implemented as macros defined in header files. 

Functional Safety standards clearly specify that qualification must be done for the application developer’s use case, so this is what we make possible with SuperGuard. 

In this presentation, we will show the principles and practice of the C standard library qualification. 

Useful Links:

• Solid Sands: https://solidsands.com/ 
• SuperTest: https://solidsands.com/supertest 
• SuperGuard: https://solidsands.com/superguard