Software in aviation is always considered to be complex and thus needs strict development assurance to achieve confidence in the correctness of implemented functionality.
Thus, development compliant to the accepted standard DO-178C/ED-12C is usually used in the industry, utilising the published supplements (DO-330, DO-331, DO-332, DO-333) for specific topics.
As DO-178C is only a meta-standard, which does not prescribe a specific development approach (agile, spiral, waterfall are all possible realisations under DO-178C), the realisation of a specific development process fitting to one's organisational setup, has proven to be challenging.
Copying a process from another company ignores the differences in setup, size, etc. of your own organisation, which may lead to non-compliance or overly costly processes.
TSSC can support you with experienced experts to:
- Develop an efficient development tailored for your setup and needs
- Act as SW CVEs towards EASA for certification
- Support you with experienced manpower within your development project
- Train your personnel in DO-178C
Planning activities and defining efficient processes and working instructions is a key aspect for an efficient and compliant SW development. For efficiency, the SW development, which makes heavy use of tooling for its tasks, needs to be integrated with the system, security and safety activities and tooling. Otherwise, breaks in development, which are costly especially when changes to the product and its requirement occur, are unavoidable.
Software development must also be liveable by the developers involved: activities, which are only performed “because they are formally required by the process” will be skipped, leading to problems late in development and non-compliance for certification.
TSSC can support you in defining an efficient, compliant process, create the SW plans and instructions for you as well as training personnel on the content and rationale of DO-178C objectives and activities.
Process Definition Support
TSSC can support you with defining your processes for requirements engineering, architecture, design, coding and integration of software, as well as with the verification activities (analysis, review, testing) and the quality assurance and configuration management as well. We put the emphasis on an integrated approach within your company that is useable and efficient, tailoring DO-178C to your setup and needs. Definition of processes and working instructions also include the creation of templates for the artefacts along the development.
Plan Creation Support
DO-178C puts emphasis on planning activities up front and thus requires plans for development, verification, configuration management, and quality assurance as well as the overarching Plan for Software Aspects for Certification (PSAC). Supporting are standards for requirements engineering, design, coding and modelling (if used). TSSC can create these plans and standards for you for your development project.
Training
For training information see Training