Adopting a DevOps strategy to develop safety-critical embedded software in avionic systems

Safety is the aviation industry's main concern. A high level of reliability of the aircraft and all its systems, parts and equipment must be demonstrated through a process called certification. This process is essential for safety in a critical system, where failure can result in injury or loss of life. It defines regulatory requirements, described in standards, imposing constraints on aircraft development. By complying with these requirements, manufacturers are committed to ensuring the safety of passengers, on-board personnel, ground staff and infrastructure.

Society's need to ensure the safety of goods and people means that a certain number of steps must be taken to obtain a type certificate, issued by a certification authority. For the manufacturer, the certification process involves demonstrating to this authority compliance with all regulatory requirements.

Only the correct application of an engineering process can guarantee that the system meets safety objectives. The actions required to demonstrate compliance complicate the engineering process, and require considerable effort, if the associated issues are not taken into account from the outset of the project. This process could be carried out in a more agile way.

[H 8 060] demonstrates that it is possible to integrate certification into the engineering process in an agile way (called continuous certification), by proposing an efficient and structured methodological approach, which enables certification requirements to be met natively. The approach aims to improve, accelerate and rationalize the development of avionics software subject to certification: it promotes better integration of certification requirements, by speeding up software development, without compromising compliance with safety requirements. It is based on the principles of continuous development which, combined with agile project management, enable certification actions to be iterated and automated transparently, with limited impact on overall development costs.

This article extends [H 8 060] by proposing a DevOps approach to support the...