CMMI-DEV process areas modeled on a process for critical embedded systems development

The importance of developing state-of-the-art and quality software grows exponentially by the increased use of computer systems. The Software Engineering was born with the mission of introducing in its activities the disciplined principles of industrial engineering and thus empowering and directing developers of such products into the use of processes in software development. The maturation of the use of such activities showed that the most qualified personnel often may be incapable of doing the best systematically when the process was not understood or executed the best possible way. The use of quality models already used at other industry fields, adjusted to the software products characteristics is an alternative to Software Engineering for continuously achieving the improvement of its products quality. Various software development sectors, particularly small companies or those which develop software products considered "small", do not use processes neither follow quality models to improve their development, understanding that such models could bureaucratize the development activities, or perhaps they believe that processes are unnecessary due to the development's magnitude, thus compromising their deadlines and costs. One sector which requires great concern over quality is the Embedded Computer Systems, since they produce a class of software widely present in our daily life, at such level that they often pass unnoticed and in case of failures they can provoke fatal accidents. The greatest feature of such systems is the ability to achieve extremely important tasks with little computational resources, representing a high degree of restrictions for its development and operation. To ensure the Embedded Systems operation, we need to employ processes in the development with defined procedures which identify and assist the development of products with such particularities and make provision so that errors could be eliminated or minimized by activities which must be executed within all development phases and not just correct the errors when found at specific phases. The increasing use of embedded systems and the identification of several accidents provoked by problems in that kind of systems have stimulated studies and researches that might contribute to minimize these accidents. This paper presents part of a study realized towards the elaboration of a process for the complete development (hardware and software) of embedded systems. The process is organized in phases and activities, and has document templates that lead developers to use the good practices suggested by the quality model CMMI-DEV/V1.3 in a simplified manner and slightly bureaucratic, thus showing that it is feasible the use of processes and quality models in software development process in general.