Re: regulatory verification of code for medical products

From:

red floyd <no.spam@here.dude>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++.moderated

Date:

Fri, 7 Dec 2007 05:23:23 CST

Message-ID:

<Qx16j.3100$Vq.510@nlpi061.nbdc.sbc.com> <f9bb85eb-be13-4dcd-af9c-5bd9d82b5745@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com>

todma wrote:

Hello!
I am involved in medical products and C++; for validation and
verification of code that can harm patients, it seems the govt.
requires documentation and testing of every 'function' or 'method'.
('routine?').
In C++ you might write a large quantity of accessor, query, inline
functions.
In more legacy (older style) systems there are larger functions that
just manipulate data in less safe ways.

So it would seem that the verification (and documentation) of C++ code
would be _much_ more difficult or time consuming.
There are _many_ more function calls that each do less work but
together in a system should be more stable if designed properly. The
syntax (or design idioms?) use function calls more frequently.

Is anyone on this group familiar with this issue and have anything to
say about it, or any advice?

This issue is very familiar. We deal with it in the avionics world.

What you are looking at is called "Unit Test". There are many
frameworks, both F/LOSS and commercial for unit test. Integration test
is still done much more manually, but Unit test verifies that your
low-level building blocks are functioning properly.

Google for C++ Unit Test (and also for cppunit).

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