Ingo Speer, SYSGO project engineer


Making DECODER a great project for developers in regulated industries

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How would you present DECODER?

DECODER will help software engineers to organize, verify and handle their code. Existing code does often have the problem of huge amounts of informal or semi-formal information hard to trace to the software functions. This is essential for developing for regulated, safety-critical industries, like automotive or avionics. However, all other software projects will benefit from reducing the efforts that need to be spend in these fields. The tools developed in DECODER have the potential to help developers managing the complexity of source code, as well as the complexity of artefacts, such as requirements, diagrams, designs, documentation and test results. Leveraging the information stored in this informal or semi-formal documents is one key goal of DECODER.

What is your role in DECODER?

SYSGO is providing the embedded use case to the researchers in DECODER. We will mainly focus on how DECODER tools can support engineers with software-verification and -validation, as well as the generation of artefacts like reports, necessary for certification. Therefore, our software engineers will apply DECODER on typical embedded software and give feedback to DECODER developers to optimize and fine-tune the tools developed in the project. Another task is to make sure that DECODER tools can fit in typical embedded development methodologies like the V-model heavily used in safety-critical industries. In addition to the other use cases in the project, this will ensure that DECODER will be useful for a wide range of different software projects.

What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?

With more than 25 years of experience in developing safety-critical software, SYSGO brings the knowledge about embedded industrial software development with respect to standards, best practices and verification. Embedded systems describe a wide range of different kinds of software with different criticalities. If you take drivers, for instance: a watchdog driver is a highly critical service and usually comes with a very small and well-tested code size. However other drivers, like an embedded ethernet driver, have a huge code base with a lower criticality to the system. Often it is not feasible to test these huge code bases to the same assurance levels like a watchdog driver - and because of it's lower criticality, it is also not necessary.
Our experience with such aspects will help, making DECODER an interesting project for developers in regulated industries.

A word about yourself and your organization

I am a project engineer at SYSGO next to the German city of Mainz. My focus are embedded systems and real-time operating systems. Here at SYSGO, our core competences are developing real-time capable operating systems and embedded hypervisors for regulated safety- and security-critical industries like avionic and railway.