Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe

TL;DR

This paper discusses integrating safety analysis into continuous delivery processes for safety-critical software, emphasizing the need for updating safety tests with each change to maintain safety compliance.

Contribution

It proposes treating safety analysis as a core deliverable in continuous delivery, providing guidelines and highlighting areas for future research.

Findings

Safety analysis should be updated with every software change.

Guidelines are formulated for integrating safety analysis into continuous delivery.

Future research areas are identified for better safety assurance.

Abstract

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 fulfills 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.