At the Sharp End: developing and validating Safety Critical Software

Abstract

Whatever methods and tools are used to generate and maintain the safety case for a project, at some stage the software needs to be developed, verified and validated. With its associated documentation set, this can easily become a very expensive and time consuming exercise, which is largely repeated for each version. This paper examines some of the key issues that impact time and cost, shares previous lessons learnt and describes some key methods that can reduce time and cost. Metrics are provided where available to help quantify the associated benefits.