A safety-centric change management framework by tailoring agile and V-Model processes

Safety critical systems are evolutionary and subject to preventive, perfective, corrective or adaptive changes during their lifecycle. Changes to any part of those systems can undermine the confidence in safety since changes can refute articulated claims about safety or challenge the supporting evidence on which this confidence relies. Changes to the software components are no exception. In order to maintain the confidence in the safety performance, developers must update their system and its safety case. Agile methodologies are known to embrace changes to software where agilists strive to manage changes, not to prevent them. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework in which we tailor a hybrid process of agile software development and the traditional V-model. The tailored process aims to facilitate the accommodation of non-structural changes to the software parts of safety critical systems. We illustrate our framework in the context of ISO 26262 safety standard