Scrum for safety: an agile methodology for safety-critical software systems

Abstract

In the last years, agile methodologies are gaining substantial momentum, becoming increasingly popular in a broad plethora of industrial contexts. Unfortunately, many obstacles have been met while pursuing adoption in secure and safe systems, where different standards and operational constraints apply. In this paper, we propose a novel agile methodology for the development and innovation of safety-critical systems. In particular, we developed an extension of the well-known Scrum methodology and discussed the complete workflow. We finally validated the applicability of the proposed methodology over a real case study from the railway domain.