A Proposal for an Adapted Scrum for Aeronautical Software Development

Safety-critical Software development is, normally, regulated by norms and standards, which orients a life cycle based on requirements specification, traceability, extensive verification, configuration management, assurance, and respective evidence. Agile software development, strongly based on Agile Manifesto and its values and principles, is characterized by producing and delivering products in accordance with customer expectations and agreed deadlines and costs, based on feedback and welcome changes. Many methods have been created to provide a way to apply this philosophy, such as the widely used Scrum. This method focuses on managing software projects and respective scope through sprints, specific roles and responsibilities, ceremonies as planning, review and retrospective meetings, with the philosophy of self-organized teams, incremental product delivery and continuous improvements. Scrum, as is, does not address the aspects of the process and activities to develop a software application, let alone in the context of software in regulated environments. The research problem focuses on adapting the Scrum framework to support compliance with RTCA DO-178C guideline, providing an adequate method to be used in safety-critical software development for the aeronautical context. This adapted framework concentrates initiative of some proposals found in the literature review, with adjusts to accommodate the different approaches. It also provides traceability to the objectives of the guideline and key performance indicators to monitor the success of this strategy.