Abstract

In recent years a plan-driven approach traditionally used in safety-critical software development has been put to a test by rapidly changing technologies, more diverse group of clients and volatile market requirements. The need to deliver good quality systems, faster and at lower cost in comparison to competitors encouraged companies to look for more efficient solutions. Agile methodologies are known to successfully address these issues for small, non-critical projects. Presumably agile practices can reduce both cost and time to market when applied to safety-critical projects as well. While benefits can be significant, the main concern are quality and safety assurance. Plan-driven methodologies provide tools for such purpose, which agile methodologies in their pure form lack. The challenge that arises is to elaborate a more easily available and ready-to-use solution that would help safety-critical organizations to streamline their processes with agile practices and to maintain accordance with safety standards and certifications. The goal of the research described in this work was to develop an approach aimed at facilitating the introduction of a more agile approach to the software development process, depending on the characteristics of the project, while maintaining compliance with the required safety standards and regulations, and the AgileSafe method presented in this thesis is the main result of this research. The information about project and about the regulatory context constraining the project and its product are the inputs to the method. User is guided through two main processes of AgileSafe: process which selects the specifications of software development practices to be applied in the Project and a process which results in the set of assurance arguments corresponding to the regulations included in the regulatory context. The two main processes of AgileSafe reflect the main objectives of AgileSafe: to support a hybrid approach to software development based on the tailored practices and to support continuous monitoring of conformance to the mandatory regulatory requirements. In order to further improve the method and tailor its advice to the User’s needs more accurately, the knowledge stored in the method should be reviewed and updated regularly. To validate the proposed AgileSafe method, in the course of the research, three case studies have been conducted in addition to interviews and questionnaires with participation of experts.

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