An Iterative Approach for Development of Safety-Critical Software and Safety Arguments

The benefits ascribed to Agile methods are attractive to software engineers working in the safety-critical software domain. There is limited industrial experience and evidence of successful applications of Agile methods in this domain; however, academic research has identified some of the key challenges of their adoption and application, and has started to present feasibility studies. In this paper, the authors propose an iterative approach for developing safety-critical software, making two novel contributions. They also give details of a proof-of-concept example illustrating the use of the approach.