IJCATR Volume 5 Issue 7

Suitability of Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Systems Development: A Survey of Literature

Mary Walowe Mwadulo
10.7753/IJCATR0507.1009
keywords : Agile methods, agile methodology, safety-critical systems, Suitability

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Lately, agile methods have widely been used in large organizations. This contrasts to previous practice, where they were mainly used for small projects. However, developers of safety critical systems have shied away from using these methods for the right and wrong reasons. Adoption of agile methods for safety critical system development is low and there is need to find out why this is so especially since agile methods allow a more relaxed approach towards documentation, flexible development lifecycle based on short iterations and accommodates changing requirements. This paper presents a report of a detailed analysis of literature and aims to shed light on the suitability of agile methods for developing safety critical systems .The findings indicate that many organizations are relying on traditional methods to develop safety critical systems because they are familiar with them and have been thoroughly tested over time. However with the advent of agile methods there is a paradigm shift by non safety critical system developers, nevertheless this is not happening with the safety critical system developers and there is need to find out why.
@artical{m572016ijcatr05071009,
Title = "Suitability of Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Systems Development: A Survey of Literature",
Journal ="International Journal of Computer Applications Technology and Research(IJCATR)",
Volume = "5",
Issue ="7",
Pages ="465 - 471",
Year = "2016",
Authors ="Mary Walowe Mwadulo"}
  • Adoption of agile methods for safety critical system development is low
  • The little research done on this area is subjective with no empirical evidence to support the findings
  • Though agile methods emphasize documentation and evolvability of requirements, this is unsuitable for safety critical system development
  • Agile practices should be tailored to the needs of safety critical system development