Interesting paper and presentation (pdf) from Emmanuel Chenu at Thales Avionics that describes how they’re using several Agile concepts as part of their safety-critical avionics software projects. With the exception of pair programming, my read is that much of this is mapping activities that have been done in a safety-critical environment (e.g. test driven development) to several Agile principles, rather than the introduction of concepts that are foreign to safety-critical development. The other one that probably hasn’t been done in most safety-critical shops is continuous integration, but I’d argue that CI (or at least a “build early and often” philosophy), has transcended Agile and is just becoming “the way things are done”, regardless of whether you’re a “Big A Agile”, agile, or iterative development shop.
Either way, it’s interesting how even the most heavy, formal, process-driven development teams are looking at aspects of Agile they can embrace to make their development more flexible, responsive, while still producing highly reliable software. Of course, as he notes, there’s obviously a limit to how “Agile” an avionics development team can really become given the level of formal documentation required through all aspects of a DO-178B project. I’m pretty sure if you ever submitted this kind of documentation to a certification authority they’d probably not accept it:
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Tags: agile, avionics, continuous integration, D0-178B
Loving the agile post it work! It’s such a nice way of working, would definiteyl recommend.