Validation and Verification

Development tools from Keil are quality assurance tested using a number of commercial and in-house test suites.

• The Perennial Validation Suite for ISO/IEC Conformance
  The Perennial Validation Suite for C is the industry standard for the verification of C compilers. The Perennial Validation Suite uses both positive and negative test techniques to accomplish the following:
  • Test basic conformance to the ISO c90 and c99 C language standards.
  • Generate self-checking C programs that test permutations of operators and data types.
  • Determine the size of certain compile time limits, e.g., significant length of identifiers or how deeply include files may be nested.
  • Test for legal expressions by generating self-checking expressions of arbitrary complexity.
• In-house validation test suite for Language Extensions
  This test suite verifies operation of language extensions that are not tested by the Plum/Hall test suite.
• In-house validation test suite for Code Quality
  This test suite compares the code generated by a new compiler version with previous releases. Differences are highlighted and manually verified to ensure accuracy and code density.
• In-house validation test suite for Real-Time Kernels
  These test suites include a complex real-time application that tests all aspects of the kernel. All library routines are tested with a variety of parameter values.

All test suites generate automatic error reports.

Our integrated product validation process utilizes and tests all the development tools and helps verify proper operation. Using the test suites listed above, the validation and verification process is as follows:

1. The compiler generates assembler output for all test suites.
2. The assembler creates object files from the compiler-generated assembler code.
3. The linker links this code with the standard libraries and produces an executable binary.
4. The error-free program is executed by the µVision Simulator. Output from the simulation is compared with prior validation sequences to ensure correct operation of the tools.

Products are released only after successfully completing each step of the validation and verification process.