Bridging the gap between testing and safety certification

DO-178C and its supplement DO-331 provide a set of objectives to be achieved for any development of airborne software systems when model-driven development approaches are in use. Fail-safeMBT is an academic recently proposed model-based approach for testing safety-critical systems. Fail-safeMBT is a potential innovative testing process that needs compelling arguments to be adopted for the development of aeronautical software. In this paper, we reduce the gap between industrial settings and academic settings by adopting the safety case approach and derive substantiation data aimed at arguing Fail-safeMBT compliance with the standards. We explain Fail-safeMBT processes in compliance with software process engineering Meta-Model 2.0, then apply Fail-safeMBT on the Autopilot system. Finally, we link Fail-safeMBT outputs to DO-178/DO-331 process elements, then we derive a substantiation from Fail-safeMBT outputs to support the compelling arguments for achieving certification objectives. Thus, we provide a validation of Fail-safeMBT in the avionic domain.