Software Testing Tools for IEC 60880
Achieve compliance with certified software testing & static analysis
IEC 60880
Software Safety Standards for the Energy Industry
IEC 60880:2006 (Nuclear Power Plants – Instrumentation and Control Systems Important to Safety – Software Aspects for Computer-Based Systems) is a functional safety standard which, together with IEC 62138, covers the software aspects of computer based systems used in nuclear power plants to perform functions important to safety. IEC 60880 provides requirements for the safety category A as defined by IEC 61226.
Fitness for purpose litigation against companies and individuals is now an increasing risk. IEC 60880:2006 is a technical standard used by lawyers to interpret laws. The relevant law in question for Europe is the General Product Safety Directive 2001/95/EC (GPSD). This states that the product creator has the responsibility to develop a safety critical product in a way which is compliant with ‘State-of-the-Art’ development principles. ‘State-of-the-Art’ simply refers to commonly accepted best practices, which in the case of nuclear electronic safety related systems are now embodied in IEC 60880:2006. Where companies fail to employ accepted industry practices, they cannot use the “State-of-the-Art” legal defence against such litigation.
Static Analysis for IEC 60880 Compliance
IEC 60880 defines rigorous requirements for safety-related software, including the specification of interfaces and value ranges, performance and response-time constraints, safe language subsets, and the use of automated tools for static analysis and simulation. By enforcing MISRA-based coding standards and code metrics, and providing automated static analysis of C/C++ source code, QA-MISRA supports compliance with the normative methods of IEC 60880. It helps demonstrate correspondence and consistency between design levels while ensuring that safety-critical modules are verifiable, robust, and free from error-prone constructs.
To learn more about how QA-MISRA supports the recommendations of IEC 60880, please refer to the QA-MISRA Safety Manual.
Unit & Integration Testing for 60880 Compliance
Cantata helps accelerate compliance with the standard’s software testing requirements by automating:
- Test framework generation
- Identifies code defects and security vulnerabilities
- Test execution
- Results diagnostics and report generation
Please contact us for more information on Cantata for IEC 60880.
The IEC 60880 requirements for software testing and how these are supported by Cantata are summarised in our White Paper “Cantata Standard Briefing IEC 60880:2006”.
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Tool Certification & Qualification
QA Systems’ tools have been classified and certified by SGS-TÜV GmbH, an independent third party certification body for functional safety, accredited by Deutsche Akkreditierungsstelle GmbH (DAkkS). Cantata has been certified as usable in development of safety related software according to IEC 60880:2006.
The tool certification kit for IEC 60880 is available to ease our customers’ path to certification. This contains everything needed to prove that Cantata fulfills IEC 60880 recommendations as well as guidance to help you to achieve compliance.
For our static analysis tool QA-MISRA, our tool Qualification Support Kit (QSK) automatically executes a full tool qualification verification test suite on the installed tool configuration and generates the necessary reports for IEC 60880 tool qualification.
These tool kits for IEC 60880 are available to ease our customers’ path to certification. They contain everything needed to prove that Cantata and QA-MISRA provide the required confidence in the use of software tools under IEC 60880 recommendations as well as comprehensive and detailed guidance on how to use them to comply with the required software verification activities of IEC 60880.
Please contact us for more information about these tool kits.
Whether you’re evaluating tools or have technical questions, please contact us.