Case Study: Nissan achieves improved software reliability with MathWorks Polyspace products

Nissan Increases Software Reliability

Nissan needed to improve the reliability of software in its electronic control units (ECUs) and to find hard-to-detect run-time errors (divisions by zero, overflows, out-of-bounds accesses) that existing static tools missed. To address this, Nissan engaged MathWorks and piloted its Polyspace products, specifically Polyspace Bug Finder and Polyspace Code Prover, to analyze supplier and in-house C/C++ code early in development.

MathWorks’ Polyspace tools were integrated into Nissan’s review process to exhaustively detect run-time errors and prove operations that are safe, allowing fixes during coding rather than later testing. The effort uncovered measurable supplier defects—about five major bugs per project (~30K lines of code or ~100K ROM)—improved overall software reliability, reduced testing effort and costs, and led many Nissan suppliers to adopt Polyspace products.

Nissan

Mitsuhiko Kikuchi

Leader of the Software Quality Group