Software Safety Standards: Evolution and Lessons Learned

As safety issues occur in many domains, software safety standards provide guidelines for development of software systems that operate in safety-critical environments. However, evolution of existing software safety standards diverges under various circumstances and environments. To understand the purpose of these standards on their domains and the effect of changing the environment on evolution of these standards, we conducted a survey on the history of the families of DO-178 (Commercial avionics), MIL-STD-882 (US Department of Defense), and DEF-STAN 00-56 (UK Ministry of Defense). Additionally, we learned that even in different environments, there are certain features in common that are preferred by industry and would likely be added to newer versions of the standard. In other words, these features are very likely to be must-haves when constructing new standards in the future.