A cross-domain comparison of software development assurance standards
Résumé
This paper compares the influence of Development Assurance Levels (DALs) on the prescribed objectives, activities, methods and tools of six different software development assurance standards, indeed that of civil aviation, automotive, space, process automation, nuclear and railway.
Through an inventory of their respective requirements, we attempt to compare the software safety levels ensured by each standard for its lowest and highest DALs.
We first explain the rationale of the comparison, i.e on what basis we compare the securing effects of the various process-based or product-based requirements issued by the six software development assurance standards. Then we review the DAL-dependent variability of each standard and finally outline some tentative cross-domain equivalence classes or ranking.