Software Verification for Real-Time Systems: What Developers Need to Know About Vector's Acquisition

Cut deadline risk and certification friction: what fragmented toolchains means for real-time software verification

If your team still treats timing analysis as an afterthought—adding conservative margins, fighting multicore interference, and wrestling with fragmented toolchains—you’re paying in wasted CPU, delayed releases and brittle certification evidence. In January 2026 Vector Informatik acquired StatInf’s RocqStat timing-analysis technology and team to fold advanced WCET (worst‑case execution time) estimation into the VectorCAST toolchain. That move is a turning point for teams that build safety-critical, real‑time systems in automotive and adjacent industries.

Executive summary: three strategic impacts

• Unified toolchain: VectorCAST + RocqStat combines code testing, coverage and timing analysis in a single workflow—reducing handoffs and evidence gaps during certification.
• Better timing fidelity: statistical and measurement-enhanced WCET approaches reduce unnecessary CPU margin and enable more deterministic system design—especially important for domain controllers and ADAS workload consolidation.
• Certification leverage: integrated workflows simplify traceability and tool qualification evidence for functional safety standards (ISO 26262) and avionics (DO‑178C) contexts, while introducing new discussion points about probabilistic methods.

Why this matters now (2026 context)

By early 2026, OEMs and Tier‑1s are consolidating functions onto heterogeneous domain controllers, adding real‑time ML inference, and pushing hardware utilization to reduce cost. Those trends increase pressure on accurate timing analysis. The Vector–RocqStat deal lands against several developments:

• domain consolidation and higher ASIL requirements for centralized ECUs;
• multicore interference becoming the dominant source of timing unpredictability;
• industry acceptance of measurement/statistical WCET as a complement to static methods (driven by tooling improvements and traceability demands); and
• stronger regulator‑vendor collaboration on acceptable evidence for probabilistic guarantees (late‑2025 guidance from industry groups encouraged hybrids of static and statistical methods).

What RocqStat brings to VectorCAST—technically

RocqStat's core competency is advanced timing analysis and statistical WCET estimation backed by trace data and analytics. Integrated into VectorCAST, teams can expect:

• Measurement-guided WCET: automated ingestion of execution traces from instrumented tests (unit, integration, hardware‑in‑the‑loop) and conversion into probabilistic execution‑time distributions.
• Hybrid workflows: seamless stitching of static path analysis and measurement results to identify unobserved worst‑case paths and quantify confidence bounds.
• Multicore-aware models: improved modeling of interference effects and contention on shared resources when combined with execution traces from realistic workloads.
• Data‑driven safety margins: explicit, auditable confidence levels (e.g., 1e‑6 exceedance) instead of opaque, ad‑hoc headroom percentages.

Real effect for engineering teams

Practically, this reduces the typical back‑and‑forth between software, test and system architects. Instead of creating separate timing artefacts in yet another tool, teams will run tests, collect traces, and produce WCET evidence from the same toolchain that already manages unit tests and coverage.

How verification workflows will change

Expect verification to move from disjoint stages into an integrated, repeatable pipeline. Below is a pragmatic pipeline you can adopt now.

Recommended pipeline: unit → integration → timing analysis → safety case

1. Instrument during unit and integration tests. Enable lightweight tracing hooks or hardware trace ports; maintain deterministic build flags for timing runs.
2. Execute on representative hardware. Run tests on the same OS, scheduler and clock configuration as target ECU to capture realistic interference.
3. Aggregate traces into the timing tool. Use the unified VectorCAST/RocqStat flow to convert traces into execution profiles and per‑path statistics.
4. Run hybrid analysis. Combine static path analysis for unobserved paths with statistical estimates to produce conservative but tighter WCET bounds with defined confidence levels.
5. Surface findings to architects. Provide per‑function WCET, confidence intervals, and recommended mitigations where margins are insufficient (e.g., change scheduling, increase priority, or split tasks).
6. Store artefacts for audits. Export trace evidence, analysis parameters, and tool configuration for the certification body and tool qualification.

Example CI snippet (GitHub Actions style)

Use this as a pattern to run testing and timing analysis in CI. Replace tool names and container images with vendor-provided artifacts.

# .github/workflows/timing-analysis.yml
name: timing-analysis
on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build-test-timing:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Build target image
        run: make build TARGET=stm32
      - name: Run unit tests with VectorCAST
        run: | 
          docker run --rm -v ${{ github.workspace }}:/src vectorcast/vectorcast-cli \
            vectorcast run --project my_project --tests unit
      - name: Collect traces (example)
        run: ./tools/collect_traces.sh --target /dev/ttyUSB0 --out traces/
      - name: Run RocqStat analysis (pseudocode)
        run: |
          docker run --rm -v ${{ github.workspace }}:/data statinf/rocqstat-cli \
            rocqstat analyze --traces /data/traces --confidence 1e-6 --out /data/wcet.json
      - name: Upload WCET report
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: wcet-report
          path: wcet.json
  

Note: above commands are illustrative. Work with Vector to obtain the exact CLI and Docker images for VectorCAST and RocqStat components once available. For a production-grade CI/CD approach, consult a DevOps playbook to make headless runs reproducible and auditable.

Certification: what changes and what stays the same

Tool integration addresses a frequent certification pain point: fragmented evidence. However, new capabilities also change the conversation with assessors.

What gets easier

• Traceability: one tool repository for tests, coverage, and timing artefacts reduces manual mapping errors when compiling your safety case.
• Reproducibility: versioned analysis configurations and stored traces speed tool‑qualification and provide clearer audit trails.
• Granularity: per‑function, per‑path statistics allow targeted remediation rather than blanket margins.

What assessors will ask about

Probabilistic WCET estimation is increasingly accepted as complementary to static methods, but assessors will require:

• clear statement of the confidence level and exceedance probability used in the safety argument,
• justification for the representativeness of measurement workloads and environment, and
• evidence of tool qualification—how the timing tool was validated and how automation avoids human error. Vendors are beginning to publish explainability and validation artefacts to support this conversation.

Automotive World reported on January 16, 2026 that Vector will integrate RocqStat into VectorCAST to create a unified environment for timing analysis and software verification.

Practical certification checklist (ISO 26262 focus)

• Map each timing analysis artefact to the safety plan and FMEDA results.
• Document the trace collection environment, including hardware revisions, OS scheduler configuration, and background tasks.
• Preserve raw traces, analysis scripts, and the exact tool versions used to generate WCET numbers.
• Define confidence level and justify selected probability assumptions within the safety case.
• Plan for tool qualification: request vendor tool qualification kits (TQKs) and demonstrate equivalence if a tool update occurs mid‑project.

Adoption plan: phased migration for engineering teams

Adopt the new VectorCAST + RocqStat capabilities in phases to de‑risk migration.

1. Pilot project: pick one control loop with well‑defined deadlines. Validate trace collection and run the hybrid analysis end‑to‑end.
2. Integrate into CI: automate trace capture for nightly runs and retain artifacts for 90+ days to analyze rare timing events.
3. Calibration phase: run parallel analysis with your legacy WCET method and the new statistical results to tune confidence thresholds and margins.
4. Operationalize: update timing budgets, scheduler parameters, and safety cases based on the new evidence.
5. Scale: roll out to more ECU projects, and use lessons learned to create corporate templates for analysis configuration and evidence packaging.

Key roles and responsibilities

• Software engineers: ensure deterministic builds and add trace hooks.
• Test engineers: design representative workloads and coordinate hardware‑in‑the‑loop runs.
• System architects: set timing budgets and accept/reject safety margin reductions.
• Safety engineers: craft the safety argument and define acceptable confidence thresholds.
• DevOps: automate reproducible pipelines and archive artefacts for audits. See a practical DevOps playbook for pipeline patterns and artifact retention.

Technical considerations and pitfalls

Be realistic about what statistical WCET can and cannot do.

• Representative workload is everything: poorly chosen inputs produce misleading confidence numbers. Cover corner cases, error paths and worst‑case ISR interactions.
• Multicore non-determinism: measuring interference requires orchestrated background tasks and exhaustive scheduling scenarios; combine measurement with analytical interference models where necessary.
• Clock and timestamp accuracy: ensure high-resolution timestamps and synchronized clocks across measurement sources to avoid noise in the distribution tails.
• Data volume: statistical methods often need large trace sets to estimate tail probabilities (e.g., 1e‑6 exceedance). Plan storage and automated trace pruning—consider scalable OLAP approaches for trace archives like those discussed in systems on time-series and trace storage.
• Toolchain versioning: changes in compiler optimization or RTOS patches can invalidate earlier WCET estimates—treat each baseline change as a re‑validation event.

Procurement and vendor evaluation checklist

When you evaluate Vector’s integrated offering, ask vendors the following:

• Does the solution provide a reproducible CLI and headless mode suitable for CI/CD?
• What tool qualification artefacts and test suites are provided for ISO 26262 / DO‑178C evidence?
• How are trace formats standardized or exported for long‑term archiving?
• What architectures are supported out of the box (ARM Cortex‑M/A, RISC‑V, PowerPC), and how is multicore interference modeled?
• What SLAs, training and migration services are included for customers transitioning from other WCET tools?
• How are software updates handled in relation to tool qualification—vendor-managed freeze windows, cherrypicks or signed release branches?

Concrete example: ADAS control loop case study

Scenario: a lane-keeping assist control loop with a 5 ms deadline running on a consolidated domain controller.

1. Legacy static WCET says 4.4 ms (worst path pessimistic due to abstraction of bus arbitration), so architects plan 20% headroom and assign CPU budget accordingly.
2. Pilot with RocqStat collects 50k traces across scheduler scenarios, demonstrating a measured 99.999% quantile at 2.8 ms but identifies a rare path where memory contention spikes to 3.6 ms. Hybrid analysis flags that this rare path is tied to a specific background task pattern.
3. Mitigation: change background task scheduling and add a priority ceiling for the control loop. Re‑run measurement—new 99.999% quantile at 2.9 ms with no observed contention spikes.
4. Result: validated reduction of conservative margin, freeing CPU cycles to consolidate another service without changing hardware. The safety case documents the confidence level, test workload, trace archive and the scheduling change evidence.

Future predictions: where this integration leads in 2026–2028

Expect the following trajectories:

• Operational WCET monitoring: runtime monitors that compare live execution to certified WCET envelopes and trigger graceful degradation if exceeded. These runtime guards will increasingly borrow ideas from edge AI observability patterns.
• Model‑based scheduling co‑design: tighter integration with AUTOSAR Adaptive and classic scheduling models, enabling earlier tradeoffs between feature consolidation and schedulability.
• Regulatory harmonization: clearer guidance on accepted probabilistic methods as industry confidence grows and vendors provide stronger evidence packages.
• AI‑assisted trace analysis: ML models that identify likely unobserved worst paths and suggest targeted stress tests to surface them.

Actionable takeaways

• Start a pilot now: choose a mid‑criticality feature to validate RocqStat + VectorCAST hybrid analyses and tune confidence thresholds.
• Design your CI pipeline for trace capture and retention from day one—storage and reproducibility are non‑negotiable for certification.
• Combine static and statistical methods: use static analysis to ensure completeness and statistical methods to tighten budgets with quantified confidence.
• Engage safety assessors early: present the proposed confidence model and workload representativeness strategy rather than surprising them during audit.
• Ask vendors for tool qualification kits and migration services—this acquisition should accelerate vendor-supplied artefacts, but verify availability and timelines.

Conclusion & next steps

The Vector acquisition of RocqStat is more than a product add‑on: it signals a shift toward integrated, data‑driven timing verification within mainstream verification toolchains. For development teams building real‑time, safety‑critical systems, that means fewer handoffs, tighter timing budgets and clearer certification evidence—if you adopt it with a disciplined, measurement‑aware process.

If you’re responsible for scheduling, safety or tooling strategy, now is the time to pilot hybrid WCET workflows and update your CI pipelines for traceability. Start by mapping one control loop to a pilot project, request vendor tool qualification artefacts, and define the confidence levels you will accept in your safety case.

Call to action

Ready to modernize your timing verification? Contact us to design a 90‑day pilot integrating VectorCAST with measurement‑based WCET analysis, or download our checklist and CI template to get started. Move from fear‑based margins to evidence‑driven timing with predictable certification outcomes.

Related Reading

• Tool Sprawl for Tech Teams: A Rationalization Framework to Cut Cost and Complexity
• Building and Hosting Micro‑Apps: A Pragmatic DevOps Playbook
• Edge AI Code Assistants in 2026: Observability, Privacy, and the New Developer Workflow
• Storing Large Trace Sets and When to Use OLAP Approaches
• Muslin for the Kitchen: Using Muslin Bags to Make Syrups, Infusions, and Homemade Cordials
• If Apple Pays a $38B Fine: Spillover Risks for Crypto Companies and App Stores
• Why Now Is a Great Time to Upgrade Your Thermostat or Vent Controls (Sales + Smart Options)
• Pop-Up Cafe Business Model for Small Campgrounds: A Host’s Playbook
• Kid-Friendly Ways to Teach Value: Using Pokémon and MTG Boxes to Learn Money Skills