Challenges of Scaled Agile for Safety-Critical Systems

Abstract

Automotive companies increasingly adopt scaled agile methods to allow them to deal with their organisational and product complexity. Suitable methods are needed to ensure safety when developing automotive systems. On a small scale, R-Scrum and SafeScrum ® are two concrete suggestions for how to develop safety-critical systems using agile methods. However, for large-scale environments, existing frameworks like SAFe or LeSS do not support the development of safety-critical systems out of the box. We, therefore, aim to understand which challenges exist when developing safety-critical systems within large-scale agile industrial settings, in particular in the automotive domain. Based on an analysis of R-Scrum and SafeScrum ® , we conducted a focus group with three experts from industry to collect challenges in their daily work. We found challenges in the areas of living traceability, continuous compliance, and organisational flexibility. Among others, organisations struggle with defining a suitable traceability strategy, performing incremental safety analysis, and with integrating safety practices into their scaled way of working. Our results indicate a need to provide practical approaches to integrate safety work into large-scale agile development and point towards possible solutions, e.g., modular safety cases.

Challenges of Adopting SAFe in the Banking Industry – A Study Two Years After Its Introduction

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Ethics-Based Auditing of Automated Decision-Making Systems: Nature, Scope, and Limitations

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Towards Continuous Safety Assessment in Context of DevOps

“…Culture change in assessment & certification organizations: To fully leverage the benefits of DevOps in the context of safety-relevant systems, the certification process must be integrated into the continuous delivery process. Therefore, the culture of a so-called "big-bang" all-at-once certification before the release [22] needs to be changed and assessors should review the status of the project in terms of functional safety frequently. Hence, in context of DevOps, there is a need to integrate assessor as stakeholders into the contineous delivery process.…”

“…7 2 Related Work R-Scrum [2] and SafeScrum [5] are existing approaches to develop safety-critical systems using agile methods, but do not show how to build a continuous delivery pipeline. Also [22] only presents challenges how to enable agile development of safety-critical systems in large organizations. All of these papers name traceability and continues safety validation or compliance, which is an integrated part of all sprints, as a necessary step to realize agile development in regulated environments.…”