Abstract
Safety-critical systems are increasingly affecting our lives and welfare. New approaches are being developed to evaluate the abilities related to development of these systems. Process assessment can be applied to increase our trust in safety related systems development. Importance of meeting the requirements of existing safety standards and regulations has increased, but also the quality of the process assessments needs to be ensured. Important features include assessment rigour, and compliance to standards and regulatory requirements. In this paper we discuss the challenges in process assessment with highest safety-criticality and present an approach to manage the assessments by a classification of relevant assessment types. The outcome is evaluated with a domain specific example. We conclude that process assessment has significant limitations in its capability to verify safety requirements, and especially regulatory requirements. On the other hand, process assessments are applicable to certain purposes, like supplier selection, and they can be developed to include a wider coverage of evidence important to the safety-critical domain.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ISO/IEC 12207:2008, Software Life Cycle processes (2008)
+SAFE, V1.2, A Safety Extension to CMMI-DEV, V1.2. CMU/SEI-2007-TN-006 (March 2007)
ISO/IEC 15504-5:2012, Information technology – Process assessment – Part 5: An exemplar Process Assessment Model (2012)
IEC 61508-3 Ed. 2.0, Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems – Part 3: Software requirements (2010)
IEC 61513 FDIS, Nuclear power plants – Instrumentation and control for systems important to safety – General requirements for system (2011)
IEC 60880, Nuclear power plants – Instrumentation and control systems important to safety – Software aspects for computer-based systems performing category A functions (2006)
IEC 62138, Nuclear Power Plants – I&C Systems Important to Safety – Software Aspects for Computer Based Systems Performing Category B and C Functions (2004)
STUK: New YVL guides, https://ohjeisto.stuk.fi/YVL/?en=on (accessed April 12, 2014)
Common Position revision 2013. Licensing of safety critical software for nuclear reactors. Common position of seven European nuclear regulators and authorised technical support organisations (2013)
ISO/IEC 33002, Information technology – Process assessment – Part 2: Performing an Assessment (2014)
ISO/IEC 33001, Information technology – Process assessment – Concepts and terminology (2014)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Varkoi, T., Nevalainen, R. (2014). Compliance and Rigour in Process Assessment for Safety-Critical Domain. In: Barafort, B., O’Connor, R.V., Poth, A., Messnarz, R. (eds) Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 425. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43896-1_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43896-1_27
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43895-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43896-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)