Chasing the Rainbow: Streamlined Tool Qualification

Airborne software development, according to the current prescriptive certification standards, imposes restrictions, among others, on emerging technologies. Enabling new trends in software engineering, reducing cost, fostering innovations, and increasing safety is the holy grail for airborne software developers. An Overarching Properties-based process is a technology-independent approach that defines three quality properties the product must have to achieve certification approval. It is yet to be adequately investigated and officially regulated. This work explores qualifying a software tool with Overarching Properties based on the results of System-Theoretic Process Analysis. The objective is to provide confidence in the tool utilization by systematically analyzing risk factors and proving that the developer or the user has mitigated them. The argument will be structured using the Overarching Properties. We use experience from qualifying the software tools according to DO-330/ED-215 as a benchmark to evaluate our attempt in terms of cost, efficiency, and reusability.