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

Abstract

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.