The agile safety case

During the last years, there has been an increasing use of agile development methods when developing safety-critical software in order to shorten the time to market, to reduce costs and to improve quality. The Agile Safety Case forces the applicant to be specific about the quality and safety process together with technical safety aspects, enabling the certification process to be done in parallel with development and enabling the certification body to evaluate the current information at any time in the project. Moving from a waterfall/V-model to an agile model affect several parts of the safety case. Only a few international safety standards, like e.g. EN 5129 (Railway) and ISO 26262 (Automotive), require a safety case to be developed. In the future, we expect that more safety standards will include a safety case approach. The railway safety standard EN 50129 does include a list of topics that can be included in safety cases even for other domains.