The R-Check SCA plugin for SCA Architect

SCA Architect™ is the Model Driven Development tool of the most popular SCA development solution world-wide, the SCARI Software Suite. The Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) was first to provide model-driven development for the SCA world. SCA Architect provides an unambiguous graphical modeling language that speeds up the development of SCA components and applications. CRC’s modeling tool covers the complete SCA development life cycle, from the creation and validation of components to their assembly into applications or nodes.

R-Check SCA simplifies Software Communications Architecture (SCA) compliance testing. The SCA includes requirements that cut across source code, CORBA middleware IDL, and XML descriptor files. R-Check accelerates SCA development by supporting integrated testing across file types, ensuring completeness and consistency. Test coverage includes core POSIX and Minimum CORBA tests with expanded test coverage being added continuously. SCA specific testing and validation tools benefit the vendor community developing and deploying software defined radios.

By incorporating R-Check SCA into daily development cycles, SDR developers will see equivalent testing results to those produced at the certifying agency and can address non-compliance prior to submission for certification. Pretesting within the same framework as the certifying agency increases time to deployment while reducing development expense, by reducing the need for expensive dry-runs and iterative submissions for certification.

The association between CRC and Reservoir Labs has led to the creation of a new plugin for SCA Architect. The integration of R-Check SCA as a plug-in for SCA Architect brings the development experience to a new level. CRC is always looking for ways to accelerate the development and shorten the development cycle. The R-Check SCA plug-in is definitely a step in this direction. With R-Check, developers can now start testing their components for SCA compliance starting as soon as source code is generated.

CRC and Reservoir Labs have worked closely together to bring to market a solution with an unprecedented level of integration between a modeling tool and a validation tool. Using SCA Architect, every time you generate new code, R-Check automatically performs validation. When source code is edited, R-Check is invoked automatically. This incremental approach is unobtrusive and very efficient. Also, any issues detected by R-Check automatically appear in Eclipse’s standard problem view. This way, the project browser gets updated and identifies which components have compliance issues.

To ensure a very high level of integration, R-check has been used to go over several hundred source files generated with SCA Architect using CRC’s very large list of test models. The result is a seamless integration of both tools. CRC and Reservoir Lab are committed to continue working together. R-Check SCA can be licenced directly from CRC.

SCA Architect is only one-piece of the SCA development puzzle. CRC offers the most popular integrated development environment called the SCARI Software Suite. The suite includes the only commercial-off-the-shelf SCA Core Framework to have been deployed in the battlefield. CRC’s ultra fast and very small Core Framework, SCARI GT, is being used by radio manufacturers from around the world.

SCA Architect features at a glance:

• Importing and Refactoring of SCA domain profiles
• Real-time model validation
• Unambiguous graphical modeling
• Zero-merge code generation for rapid application development
• Configuration management, Shared projects
• And now, seamless source code compliance checking via the R-Check plugin throughout the normal edit-recompile-run cycle

R-Check SCA features at a glance:

• Built-in SCAv2.2 and SCAv2.2.2 support
• Static Analysis, test all code at once, including across several file types
• Find violations before system integration
• Direct linking from violations to SCA source reference material

Contact:

Steve Bernier,
Research Program Manager,
Software Defined Radio
613-990-6343
steve.bernier@crc.gc.ca
www.crc.gc.ca/sdr