Overview of 10 Years of ISVV Findings in Safety-Critical Systems

Independent V&V activities are common in safety critical systems, where the need to ensure high safety and dependability is crucial. This is the case of the Space domain, namely in the Space segment (on-board and control systems). This industrial paper presents the most relevant Independent Software Verification and Validation (ISVV) metrics and some of the main problem types found during the ISVV activities performed by Critical Software in the past years. These issues have been filtered and specific technical details have been removed due to non-disclosure agreements of the related projects and customers. The presented issues have been extracted from a significant number of projects and ISVV activities, and represent more than 3000 issues found and raised by the Critical Software teams, in the aerospace domain, in projects performed in Europe, America and Asia, covering the last decade.