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ISO 26262 Safety Case – Success factors: management and traceability!

The term Safety Case is used in the automotive industry and railway industry (EN50129). The following article focuses on the automotive industry. Project experience shows that the achievement of a proven functionally safe system is complex and extensive. This is particularly true if the development of a product is spread over several companies. I will discuss the key factors to achieve the safety case objectives named in ISO26262.

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Requirement and Test Traceability – Any added value?

Requirement and Test Traceability: Think about the following situation: You are near the end of your safety-related project and you have established traceability between all the project artifacts.
In an audit (e.g. Internal Quality Assurance, Customer, External Authority) you have to demonstrate which software requirements are developed from which System Requirements. Each software requirement is linked to one or more system requirements and also any system requirement is linked to one or more software or hardware requirements. Read more

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ISO 26262 ASIL Decomposition – Pros and Cons!

ISO 26262 ASIL Decomposition: Part 9 of ISO26262 defines a scheme for dividing a requirement with a specific ASIL level into two requirements with lower ASIL levels.

In the following blog post I will address the question when the ASIL decomposition can be applied in practice and what are the advantages. At the same time, however, some practice is critically questioned in the projects regarding the ASIL decomposition. Read more

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Compiler for safety critical software – What needs to be done?

The compiler is the central “tool”, which is required for every software development. It forms the link between the human-readable high-level source code (e.g., C and C ++) and the machine code, interpretable for the hardware processor. For the development of safety critical software according to relevant functional safety standards special requirements apply for the tools used during the development. (Refer to tool qualification blog 1 and blog 2) Such functional safety standards are ISO26262 (car), EN50128 (rail), IEC61508 (automation, general) or DO178C (aerospace).  The compiler plays a special role here. On the one hand, it is the central tool for any development. On the other hand, the measures proposed in the standards can not be fully applied in practice. The blog shows a process from the aerospace industry how to use compiler for safety critical systems. This process can highly be recommended for other industries. Read more

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Freedom from Interference – The practice in Industry!

In the blog post ISO26262: Freedom from interference – What is that?, I explained the principle of Freedom from Interference. The example used was based on the automotive industry and the ISO 26262.
Now I would like to consider Freedom from Interference with respect to the industry sectors railway, aviation and automotive and share my industry experiences with you. Read more

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ISO 26262 Freedom from interference – What is that?

ISO 26262 Freedom from interference :
There are four essential measures in the development of safety-critical systems.

  1. Design of safe systems
  2. Measures to minimize random hardware errors
  3. Measures to minimize systematic hardware and software errors
  4. Organizational measures (management of functional safety)

Particularly in the design of safe systems, the principle of Freedom from interference is a powerful measure. What’s this? The following blog provides an answer to this question. Read more

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Challenges when determining the structural source code coverage on the target!

Structural Coverage Target: The proof of a 100% structural source code coverage is required by almost all functional safety standards (IEC61508, ISO26262, DO 178C, etc.). In the individual SIL / ASIL levels, only the type of source code coverage is differentiated. Essentially, the Statement Coverage (low SIL / ASIL Level), the Branch Coverage and the MC / DC Coverage (high SIL / ASIL Level) are required. For good reasons, however, e.g. no path coverage required. These would mean that you would check all the combinations of paths that are possible in a software. This would be an extremely high multiple of test cases compared to MC / DC coverage. Read more

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Good safety development process – What is it?

IEC 61508, ISO26262, DO 178C, ISO 25119: Have you ever encountered these abbreviations in your professional life? If so, there is a high probability that you are already implementing functional safety projects in your company or that you are entering the market in the near future. Perhaps you have already made the experience, or at least, heard of the fact that especially software projects in the field of functional safety can only be carried out with very high documentation / test effort. The safety development process requires this effort. In addition, such projects are very rigid, inefficient, and inflexible. Is such an argument or experience known to you? Read more

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Importance of Tool Qualification in the FuSa (part 1)!

Importance of Tool Qualification : Many companies and project teams that carry out projects for the first time in the field of functional safety have the impression that the tool qualification is critical to success and involves a great deal of effort. Although the Importance of Tool Qualification is justified, the subject is interestingly often given an not adequate attention.
This effect is very similar in several, very different industries such as aerospace, automotive or industrial automation.
The following article (part 1) therefore deals with this topic. Part 2 can be found here: Tool qualification – The phantom pain of functional safety (part 2)! Read more

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How many level of Software requirements are necessary and useful?

In my daily projects in the automotive and industrial automation industry I’m continually confronted with the following question: How many levels of software requirements have to be written? That’s an interesting question, especially if we take the aerospace industry also into account. Software requirement level are a key topic if you want to improve your requirement engineering process. Therefore, I want to highlight in this blog post this topic a bit closer. I will compare the specifications of functional safety standards IEC 61508, ISO 26262 and DO-178B / C. In the final conclusion I will provide project best practices based on my more than 15 years of experience.

In my view, a good software specification is divided into two major parts: architecture / design and textual requirements.
The architecture describes, most predominantly in graphical form, the structure and design of the software. In particular, the data and control flows are shown. The focus of textual requirements is on the description of the functionality, and the time demands on the system.
The initial question of this blog refers to the number of levels of textual requirements. Not included is the level of system requirements, which must always be present. Read more

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