Software development for medical devices: State of practice

Software in medical devices can be used in many ways to improve patient outcomes. Little contemporary data exists to document the actual practices used by software professionals for software engineering activities while building Software intensive medical devices. A carefully constructed survey has the potential to: 1) remedy the deficiency of lack of data and 2) to identify the software engineering best practices, which can then be disseminated. Two recent survey studies were conducted to explore the state of practice in Requirements Engineering and Software Architecture. Each survey attracted projects across a broad range of application domains. In this paper, we filter the reported projects from the two surveys with a focused scope on the software for medical devices projects. The results from our analysis of the filtered data are presented herein.