Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study

Abstract
In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. 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. For such products, the ability to develop safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage. In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on a mixed method approach. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution candidates for guiding future research.
Description
Keywords
Safety-critical systems, agile, continuous integration, continuous delivery
Citation
Kasauli, R., Knauss, E., Kanagwa, B., Nilsson, A., & Calikli, G. (2018, August). Safety-critical systems and agile development: a mapping study. In 2018 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) (pp. 470-477). IEEE.