Often safety critical systems development - especially for government entities - requires all tools used by developers to be themselves certified / approved / etc. at levels of rigor similar to the final delivered product. For example an off the shelf fault tree analysis tool, or a Markov model tool - which perform many internal calculations - are not trusted just because they are in widespread use; instead we have to show sufficient objective evidence that they are error free and thus trustworthy, which is the basis for trusting the calculation result itself. My customer requires any home-grown tool used for any part of the product development, to have been developed to the same level of rigor as the final product itself. Alternatively, COTS purchased tools have to show objective evidence of certification to the relevant standards. Clearly the vendor should provide such evidence. We've been using DOORS for many years and happy with it. Now I want to use it for requirements management for a government related project, where everything is challenged and scrutinized as above. Question to the forum: what evidence / collateral info / certificate / etc. is available to justify and support using DOORS on this project? Please remember that commercial and marketing arguments such as "it is the most widely used tool...", or "it has been used on many projects...", or "it is the best tool..." carry no weight in this case. Maybe some proven-in-use examples where a government entity accepted DOORS use for a safety critical project could help - if my customer can have access to that information. Best situation = some official certification that IBM could provide to support this case; if it exists how do I get it? Any other forum advice is appreciated. Aysoref - Sat Mar 26 13:43:30 EDT 2016 |
Re: Certification of DOORS for safety critical systems development Hi Gershon,
in aviation there is the same problem, every part of the resulting product must be created in a certified way. The important step here is to define these parts and to distinguish them from intermediate products. As far as I know, DOORS itself does not have an official certification that the content of the database has a reliable state. This means that for safety related components of an aircraft it is not sufficient to just refer to a specific baseline version to have a reliable and reproducible set of requirements. Instead, companies that use DOORS to create and maintain a set of requirements see it as a tool that produces an intermediate product. But the official requirements, those that get official approvals and that are kept for x years in a secure place are the printouts of e.g. a module. These printouts will be proof-read and signed by the requirements' authors, certified and locked away. This way it is not needed to use certified tools only.
You can see it like an editor for text documents or source files like notepad.exe. Nobody requires notepad.exe to be certified, because it is only the resulting file that counts, not the editor. It only has to be ensured that a specific version of the file is identical to the one going into the product.
That is different from e.g. tools that produce code out of design management tools or from compilers. These tools actively change the resulting product, often it is not possible to proof-read the result (e.g. the compilation), so these tools must be trusted and thus certified.
Hope this helps, |