Application of STAMP-Based Safety Analysis on Navigation Software Development Management

Software development management is one of key factors that affect software quality. In a real case, data for navigation system of a certain aircraft were lost frequently which made a serious threat to flight safety. Failures were recurrent on ground and then eliminated by investigators through software safety analysis using SFMEA and SFTA. However it was not applicable to figure out its underlying cause at management level just using traditional approaches. In this article, method based on System-Theoretic Accident Model and Process (STAMP) is introduced and applied to safety analysis on navigation software development management to explore management defects for the navigation software, and then some countermeasures to improve it are presented. At last, improvement proposals for familiar airborne software development management were suggested, and a subsequent survey demonstrated its significant effectiveness for improving software providers´ develop and management capacity and guaranteeing software safety.