Towards a Safety-Oriented Process Line for Enabling Reuse in Safety Critical Systems Development and Certification

Safety standards define development processes by indicating the set of partially ordered tasks that have to be executed to achieve acceptably safe systems. Process compliance constitutes a fundamental ingredient in safety argumentation for certification purposes. Certification is a very expensive, time-consuming and quality demanding activity. To increase quality and reduce time and cost, reuse-based approaches are being investigated. In this paper, we adopt process line approach in the framework of safety processes. This means that we treat a family of processes as a product line, and we identify commonalities and variabilities between them. The resulting information guides developers in reusing parts of the process, the system and safety case, e.g. which parts to make more generic, isolating changes in others to avoid ripple effects etc.