WIRRAL, England--()--LDRA this month celebrates 50 years of transforming and driving best practices in analyzing and verifying embedded software across safety-, mission-, security- and business-critical markets. Since 1975, developers have embraced LDRA products, most prominently the flagship LDRA tool suite, to address functional safety and security challenges across myriad industries. As a result, they can ensure quality is built into software from requirements through to deployment and more easily demonstrate full compliance with industry standards, reducing costs, safety and security concerns, and time to market.

LDRA was founded by Professor Mike Hennell, a specialist in mathematical science at the University of Liverpool who built a software tool to determine the cause of inconsistent responses to the same query across three different programming languages. The resulting tool ultimately enabled software developers to identify and eliminate errors early in the development process. This eventually became the LDRA tool suite, a comprehensive solution addressing the full lifecycle of software quality development, from requirements through deployment and verification.

“As embedded software becomes increasingly complex and the industry moves to software-defined ‘everything,’ having a tool that can facilitate the process for these often-disparate development teams is especially important for getting their critical systems to market,” said Ian Hennell, Operations Director for LDRA. “We have evolved this tool for 50 years, listening to our customers, and designed with the flexibility to accommodate all the new programming languages and technologies, and address the challenges our customers face.”

The LDRA tool suite specifically addresses the needs of critical embedded application development such as requirements traceability, static and dynamic code analysis, unit and integration testing, on the host development platform, as well as on target hardware. These core capabilities, which also include multicore analysis, worst case execution timing, patented data and control coupling, are complemented by extensive reporting specifically targeting the compliance requirements of target industries.

To facilitate the demonstration of compliance and certification, the tool suite also offers a web-based technology (the LDRAvault) that eases collaboration and compliance management across disparate development environments by enabling management to aggregate, manage and visualize project-related software quality information from multiple projects and team members.

50 years of software quality highlights

LDRA originally launched into the commercial market to analyze and verify software for payroll and financial account systems that were written in the ALGOL language. Hennell soon recognized the growing market for embedded systems designed for safe and secure aircraft, defense systems, control systems and other critical markets. With flexibility at the forefront of LDRA tool suite, the company soon took on support for other languages such as COBOL, Ada, Java, C and C++. LDRA has also focused on building technology partnerships over the years to address the full lifecycle of critical embedded software development and verification. LDRA has grown into a global company with direct offices in the UK, USA, Germany, and India, supported by an extensive global distributor network.

Other capabilities and services provided by LDRA and the LDRA tool suite:

  • Certification by TÜV for use in critical software development in industries such as automotive, industrial controls, rail transportation and medical devices
  • Compliance with ISO 9001 (Quality Management System) and ISO 27001 (Information Security Management)
  • LDRA personnel participate and lead the development of industry standards such as DO-178C, MISRA C and MISRA C++, ISO 26262, Future Airborne Capability Environment; earned approval as a FACE Conformance Verification Authority
  • Universities leveraging the LDRA tool suite to educate the next generation of critical embedded software developers on the best practices in software quality analysis and testing for functional safety and security
  • LDRA Certification Services with subject matter experts and on-staff DERs
  • In the aerospace industry alone, LDRA tool suite and Tool Qualification Support Packages have been leveraged by 100+ companies on more than 280 DO-178 certifications and 125 DAL A (the highest level of software assurance) certifications

“While the industry has changed tremendously over the years, one thing that has stayed the same is our commitment to helping our customers reach their business goals,” Hennell added. “That means embracing new technologies such as artificial intelligence to help us improve and advance software analysis and verification. The next 50 years should bring some incredible capabilities to our customers building these critical embedded systems.”

Embedded World

At Embedded World March 11-13 (booth 4-406), LDRA will feature new technology partnerships, worst-case execution timing capabilities and additional support for the MISRA C guidelines.

About LDRA

For 50 years, LDRA has developed and driven the market for software that automates code analysis and software testing for safety-, mission-, security- and business-critical markets. Working with clients to achieve early error identification and elimination and full compliance with industry standards, LDRA traces requirements through static and dynamic analysis to unit testing and verification for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. The company was acquired by TASKING in 2025. For more information on the LDRA tool suite, please visit www.ldra.com.

Readers may direct questions to:

Mark James
Email: mark.james@ldra.com