Scrum , documentation and the IEC 61508-3 : 2010 software standard

Authors: Thor Myklebust, Tor Stålhane, Geir Kjetil Hanssen Tormod Wien and Børge Haugset a SINTEF ICT b IDI NTNU c ABB __________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Agile development, and especially Scrum, has gained increasing popularity. IEC 61508 and several related standards for development of safety critical software has a strong focus on documentation, including planning, which shall show that all required activities have been performed. Agile development on the other hand, has as one of its explicit goals to reduce the amount of documentation and to mainly produce and maintain working software. The problem created by the need to develop a large amount of documents when developing safety critical systems is, however, not a problem just for agile development – it has been identified as a problem for all development of safety critical software. In some cases up to 50% of all project resources has been spent on activities related to the development, maintenance and administration of documents. Thus, a way to reduce the amount of documentation will benefit all developers of safety critical systems. By going systematically through all the documentation requirements in IEC 61508-1 (general documentation requirements) and IEC 61508-3 (software requirements) and by using the combined expertise of the five authors, we have been able to identify documents that are or can be generated by tools used in the requirement and development process, e.g. logs from requirement and testing tools and documents that can be made as part of the planning and discussions, e.g. snap shots of whiteboards. We have also identified documents that normally can be reused when issuing a new version of the software and identified documents that can be combined into one document.