Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe, by S. Vöst and S. Wagner
Link to article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.04164v1.pdf
One of the challenges in introducing Agile software development into safety critical systems engineering is the ability to secure the safety properties. A number of solutions exist to that challenge, none of them successfully adopted in commercial product development, though. At least to my best knowledge.
The authors of this article propose a way of addressing this challenge by continuous safety builds. A good thing is the fact that this is in the context of automotive software development, although still in the idea phase. Hope to see more of this kind of research soon!
Abstract (of the article, quoted directly from the source):
Allowing swift release cycles, Continuous Delivery has become popular in application software development and
is starting to be applied in safety-critical domains such as the automotive industry.
These domains require thorough analysis regarding safety constraints, which can be achieved by formal verification and the execution of safety tests resulting from a safety analysis on the product. With continuous delivery in place, such tests need to be executed with every build to ensure the latest software still fullfills all safety requirements. Even more though, the safety analysis has to be updated with every change to ensure the safety
test suite is still up-to-date.
We thus propose that a safety analysis should be treated no differently from other deliverables such as source-code and dependencies, formulate guidelines on how to achieve this and advert areas where future research is needed.