Developing an Argument for Def Stan 00-56 from Existing Qualification Evidence

International audienceCommonly-used civil guidance and standards in the safety-critical software industry (IEC 61508, EN 50128, DO-178B) constrain development activity and generate process and product evidence. However, procurements for UK defence systems must be supported with a safety case assessed against Def Stan 00-56 Issue 4. This paper studies the use of evidence from civil guidance and standards in arguments towards DS 00-56. The approach is centred on a particular application, the KCG qualified code generator, and is based on a generic software contribution argumentation approach. The results show that issues arise in substantiating failure conditions, choosing a suitable level of detail in the argumentand relating detailed explanations to the structure of the evidence. Explicit argumentation was found to be useful in addressing each of these issues

Automated Safety Case Compilation for Product-based Argumentation

International audienceThe main goal of a safety case is to provide a seamless argumentation why the product developed is acceptably safe for the purpose it is intended to. It usually consists of different argumentations such as product-based and process-based in order to describe the means for avoiding systematic failures during development and controlling random failures during operation. The main challenge during the compilation of a safety case is to regroup and harmonize all the information available from the different development activities in order to provide evidence for the safety attribute of the product. The contribution of this paper is to provide a solution for compilation of a safety case based on automated extraction of information coming from existing work-products