Suitability of Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Systems Development: A Survey of Literature

Abstract

Lately, agile methods have widely been used in large organizations. This contrasts to previous practice, where they were mainly used for small projects. However, developers of safety critical systems have shied away from using these methods for the right and wrong reasons. Adoption of agile methods for safety critical system development is low and there is need to find out why this is so especially since agile methods allow a more relaxed approach towards documentation, flexible development lifecycle based on short iterations and accommodates changing requirements. This paper presents a report of a detailed analysis of literature and aims to shed light on the suitability of agile methods for developing safety critical systems .The findings indicate that many organizations are relying on traditional methods to develop safety critical systems because they are familiar with them and have been thoroughly tested over time. However with the advent of agile methods there is a paradigm shift by non safety critical system developers, nevertheless this is not happening with the safety critical system developers and there is need to find out why.

Towards a continuous certification of safety-critical avionics software

“…However, safetycritical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Indeed, agile practices, according to the way they are popularized, advertise minimal documentation, refactoring of code, upfront planning and iterative release of project, that in a first sight seems to contradict safety requirement standards of safety critical systems [Mwadulo 2016]. Products that include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the non-safety critical parts.…”

“…However, very few companies in the avionics industry use agile to develop safety-critical software. They usually are conservative and want to use the traditional methods because they have been thoroughly tested over time and they are familiar with [Mwadulo 2016]. Many are afraid of having to convince the authority to introduce a new method.…”