Use of techniques and methods in the development process, including automation tools, must follow specific qualification criteria that ensure a level of safety that is in compliance with airworthiness requirements. Any tool that is used by this process must be qualified when its use could introduce or fail to reveal errors in the airborne software. This is especially true when the output of this tool is not subject to a full verification suite each time the tool is used. This directly effects candidate development tools ranging from compilers to reuse of commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS), as well as graphical code generation techniques.