When working on electronic products, many organizations divide their projects between hardware and software teams working in parallel. This is because these engineering teams have distinct methodologies to how they design, document, and communicate their changes to the design. This approach, however, can lead to costly issues, which is where a system-level bill of materials (system BoM) is critical for bringing hardware and software teams together.

Earlier this year, the White House issued an Executive Order on cybersecurity that set out to establish new security requirements for software vendors that sell software to the U.S. government. One such requirement is that vendors provide a software bill of materials (SBOM) as part of the federal procurement process. In this blog, we break down what a software bill of materials is, why it is important, and provide SBOM examples.

The automotive industry has been experiencing a great deal of change within the past several years. More software is being added to vehicles, along with a greater number of electric and autonomous vehicles are in production and on the road. By learning about the emerging trends, you will be more capable of keeping pace with them. Read along or jump ahead to the section that interests you the most.

ISO/IEC 5055:2021, titled “Information technology — Software measurement — Software quality measurement — Automated source code quality measures”, is a software quality standard. Software flaws at the technology and system level account for 8% of total errors, but consume over half the effort spent fixing problems that lead to 90% of the most serious production issues. ISO 5055 has been designed to directly measure those critical software flaws.