Towards a Distributed Continuous Certification Process

Software scale and complexity are growing by every measure: more hardware and software, more communication links, more interdependency, more lines of code, more storage and data, etc. At the same time business trends are increasingly squeezing development resources. In particular, development processes are straining under severe cost and time-to-market pressures. Global competition and market deregulation are shrinking profit margins and thus limiting budgets for the development and QA of software. In response to these trends, developers have begun to change the way they build and validate software systems by (among other things) moving towards more flexible product designs allowing dynamic reconfiguration. This approach promises to improve cost, quality, and development-time, but creates other problems, especially when used in the context of safety-critical systems. To realize this promise, however, effective certification becomes more important than ever since as static controls are removed or reduced, it becomes even more vital that (1) problems be caught as quickly as possible and (2) systems not be allowed to drift so far from their intended functional and performance requirements that rework costs overwhelm the hoped-for efficiencies. This article can present and discuss some of our recent efforts to address these problems.