Keeping Continuous Deliveries Safe

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 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, propose guidelines to adopt this and formulate implications for the development process.