Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe
This work targets safety-critical industries like automotive, where incremental updates to safety analysis are needed to support continuous delivery practices.
The paper addresses the challenge of maintaining safety in continuous delivery for safety-critical domains by proposing that safety analysis be treated as a deliverable, requiring updates with each change to ensure the safety test suite remains current.
Allowing swift release cycles, Continuous Delivery has become popular in application software development and is starting to be applied in safety-critical domains such as the automotive industry. These domains require thorough analysis regarding safety constraints, which can be achieved by formal verification and the execution of safety tests resulting from a safety analysis on the product. With continuous delivery in place, such tests need to be executed with every build to ensure the latest software still fulfills all safety requirements. Even more though, the safety analysis has to be updated with every change to ensure the safety test suite is still up-to-date. We thus propose that a safety analysis should be treated no differently from other deliverables such as source-code and dependencies, formulate guidelines on how to achieve this and advert areas where future research is needed.