An Exploratory Study of Applying a Scrum Development Process for Safety-Critical Systems
This addresses the challenge of applying agile methods to safety-critical systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Scrum and safety analysis techniques.
The study tackled the problem of integrating safety assurance into agile development for safety-critical systems by proposing and testing an Optimized S-Scrum process, showing that it improved safety and agility in a student project, with positive industry feedback.
Agile techniques recently have received attention in developing safety-critical systems. However, a lack of empirical knowledge of performing safety assurance techniques in practice, especially safety analysis into agile development processes prevents further steps. In this article, we aim at investigating the feasibility and the effects of our S-Scrum development process, and stepwise improving and proposing an Optimized S-Scrum development process for safety-critical systems in a real environment. We conducted an exploratory case study in a one-year student project "Smart Home" at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. We participated in the project and collected quantitative and qualitative data from questionnaire, interviews, participant observation, physical artifacts, and documentation review. Furthermore, we evaluated the Optimized S-Scrum in industry by conducting interviews. The first-stage results showed that by integrating STPA (System-Theoretic Process Analysis) can ensure the safety during each sprint and enhance the safety of delivered products, while the agility of S-Scrum is slightly worse than the original Scrum. Six challenges have been explored: Management changes the team's priorities during an iteration; Disturbed safety-related communication; Non-functional requirements are determined too late; Insufficient upfront planning; Insufficient well-defined completion criteria; Excessive time to perform upfront planning. We investigated further the causalities and optimizations. The second-stage results revealed that the safety and agility have been improved after the optimizations. We have gained a positive assessment and suggestions from industry. The optimized S-Scrum is feasible for developing safety-critical systems concerning the capability to ensure safety and the acceptable agility in a student project. Further attempt is still needed in industrial projects.