ED-12C/DO-178C vs. Agile Manifesto – A Solution to Agile Development of Certifiable Avionics Systems

John Marsden , André Windisch , Rob Mayo , Jürgen Grossi , Julien Villermin , Louis Fabre (1) , Claire Aventini

1 Airbus Helicopters

This paper shows how apparent contradictions between agile practices and avionic software certification objectives have been resolved in a number of Airbus projects and quantifies the resulting financial gains. Introduction Agile Agile methodologies have been adopted by the majority of today’s software projects. The advantages are accelerated development cycles, faster delivery of mature software with regular increases in functionality and the flexibility to permit requirement changes late in the development cycle. This flexibility significantly reduces project risk and development costs. Situation Avionics + Adoption Agile Traditionally, avionics software development processes are driven by certification requirements: there is a clear separation into phases with dedicated reviews, as transition criteria to the next phase and explicitly defined interaction points with the certification authorities. This is usually implemented in an incremental approach, where the full development cycle is instantiated once or twice per year, including all reviews and flight testing. Key problems with this approach are that errors are often detected late in the life cycle and late requirement changes cannot be made without endangering project milestones. The solution to these problems can be provided by careful deployment of agile methodologies, reducing the size of increments so they can be implemented within one sprint and promoting close collaboration between all project stakeholders, whilst nevertheless ensuring that the objectives of the certification standards are fulfilled. Contents Full Paper It will be explained how AIRBUS has introduced a new agile software and system development process, superseding the traditional waterfall model, which fully supports the certification objectives stipulated in [4]. It will be shown how application in 3 different projects has resulted in a productivity increase of between 15% and 25% with increased software quality. It will explain problems encountered, and how they were resolved. Furthermore the final paper will explain how the agile development approach helps bridge the gap between system and software life cycles through the introduction of cross-discipline teams.

Mots clés: Agile; Avionics; Certification; Iterative; Managing Complexity; Cost Explosion; Productivity; Scrum; Scaled Agile

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

John Marsden, André Windisch, Rob Mayo, Jürgen Grossi, Julien Villermin, et al.. ED-12C/DO-178C vs. Agile Manifesto – A Solution to Agile Development of Certifiable Avionics Systems. ERTS 2018, Jan 2018, Toulouse, France. ⟨hal-02156357⟩