Traceability Verification with respect to DO-178 and AS 9115
2022-26-1200
05/26/2022
- Event
- Content
- As many business analysts say, following Aerospace guideline DO-178 for developing aerospace software products is not cheap and it comes with a cost. That too, experts say DO-178C can increase the cost of the product above DO-178B, which already increased costs by around 20-40%. So, to keep the cost under control, it is definitely important that we need to develop the software product by following various technical methodology and processes rigorously. DO-178 relies upon significant verification (reviews, tests, and analysis) to assess product quality. However, product quality comes from a quality process, design, and implementation, not just from testing. Performing Traceability verification is one such approach to determine if the requirements are correctly and completely captured, designed, implemented and verified. In this paper we discuss the various phases of the project lifecycle where the Traceability verification needs to be performed. These Traceability verifications are a top down and bottom-up traceability check verifying that all associated artifacts are compliant to the processes defined in the approved RTCA/DO-178 planning documents and standards. The Traceability verification checks for complete end to end traceability starting from system requirements till the verification phase. Traceability verification is a mandatory requirement as per DO-178C and AS 9115. AS9115 talks about traceability in 4 clauses namely 8.2.3, 8.3.3, 8.3.5 and 8.5.1. This indicates the importance of performing Traceability verification. By performing the Traceability verification at the earlier stages in the project lifecycle, the defects can be identified and fixed thereby reducing the cost involved in the project. Also, we can avoid catastrophic failures. The intent of this technical paper is to provide details about the checks performed and the benefits obtained by performing the Traceability verification.
- Citation
- Kathiresan, P., and Valiyaparambil, P., "Traceability Verification with respect to DO-178 and AS 9115," SAE Technical Paper 2022-26-1200, 2022, .