HISC 2023 blog series: interview with Martyn Pike, UK Sales Director at AdaCore

Posted on September 21, 2023

HISC is now in its tenth year. What trends and technical advances have you seen over the past ten years which impact the trustworthiness of software ecosystems?

Ada 2012 and SPARK 2014 were pivotal moments in modernising and embracing memory safe technologies which we now see emerging in silicon, as well as software application programming languages. This combination is as close as we have ever been to having within reach a silver bullet for safe and secure systems development.

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s HISC?

To learn more about Digital Security by Design (DSbD) and DevOps for high-assurance systems development. AdaCore's work through the DSbD initiative positively impacts our internal development and verification processes. However, it will be great to learn more about the wider-reaching change CHERI and Arm Morello have had on safety and security-critical architectures across multiple sectors. In addition, DevOps has evolved from a methodology aiming to promote a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility to a widely considered essential means of compliance with modern-day tool-chain security requirements. AdaCore has been using and promoting DevOps practices for over 20 years, and it's encouraging to see the trend is now really heating up!

What lessons can we learn from the last ten years, and how can we ensure we build on experience throughout the next ten years?

We've learnt that while high assurance software development demands rigorous and disciplined engineering, it can still adopt emerging tools and techniques such as DevOps, Cloud development, Large Language Models and memory safe silicon. It's going to be an exciting next 10 years to see what those integrations yield.