Introducing Traceability in GitHub for Medical Software Development

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to integrate traceability features into GitHub, enabling developers to maintain regulatory compliance in continuous and DevOps-driven medical software development.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach to embed traceability directly into GitHub, adapting traditional traceability practices to modern agile development paradigms.

Findings

Enhanced traceability in GitHub for medical software

Supports compliance in continuous development environments

Facilitates regulatory documentation generation

Abstract

Assuring traceability from requirements to implementation is a key element when developing safety critical software systems. Traditionally, this traceability is ensured by a waterfall-like process, where phases follow each other, and tracing between different phases can be managed. However, new software development paradigms, such as continuous software engineering and DevOps, which encourage a steady stream of new features, committed by developers in a seemingly uncontrolled fashion in terms of former phasing, challenge this view. In this paper, we introduce our approach that adds traceability capabilities to GitHub, so that the developers can act like they normally do in GitHub context but produce the documentation needed by the regulatory purposes in the process.