Abstract
Organizations developing safety-critical software are increasingly seeking to create better practices by meshing agile and plan-driven development processes. Significant differences between the agile and the plan-driven processes make meshing difficult, and very little empirical evidence on using agile processes for safety-critical software development exists. There are four areas of concern, in particular, for meshing the development of safety-critical software concerning: documentation, requirements, life cycle and testing. We report on a case study of a pharmaceutical organization in which a Scrum process was implemented to support agile software development in a plan-driven safety-critical project. The purpose was to answer the following research question: For safety-critical software, what can a software team do to mesh agile and plan-driven processes effectively? The main contribution of the paper is an elaborated understanding of meshing in the four areas of concern and how the conditions for safety-critical software influence them. We discuss how meshing within the four areas of concern is a contribution to existing research.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Empirical Software Engineering |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1035-1062 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| ISSN | 1382-3256 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2020 |
Keywords
- Agile software development
- FDA
- Plan-driven software development
- Process
- Safety-critical software meshing compliance scrum