Agile Development of Safety-Critical Software

Agile software development has gained an enormous success in all kinds of product and system development. It has been expected to provide more control for the development process and to be able to deliver value to customers and developers earlier and to be able to meet challenges in changing requirements more easily than previous process lifecycle models. One area where implementation of agile processes still needs a lot of work before becoming a well understood practice is the development of safety-critical software. This paper analyses the agile principles and processes and gives guidance on how organizations could change their processes to a more agile way without risking the safety or marketability of the products or causing increased product and liability risks. In this report, IEC 61508 standard series was selected as basis for the requirements of safety-critical development.