Integration of the 4+1 Software Safety Assurance
principles with Scrum
Osama Doss
1
, Tim Kelly
2
, Tor Stålhane
3
, Børge Haugset
4
, and Mark Dixon
1
1
School of Computing, Creative Technologies, Leeds Beckett University UK
o.doss7788@student.leedsbeckett.ac.uk m.dixon@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
2
Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK
tim.kelly@york.ac.uk
3
Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway
tor.stalhane@idi.ntnu.no
4
SINTEF ICT, Trondheim Norway
borge.haugset@sintef.no
Abstract. Some researchers have attempted to tailor agile methods to comply
with specific standards (e.g. SafeScrum and IEC61508). However, this risks
over-configuring the agile method in such a way as to make it difficult to apply
it to another safety standard.
Our approach sought to look at the problems of addressing the more
fundamental principles of safety assurance by adopting the 4+1 safety principles
and investigating how a Scrum process challenges, and can be adapted to give
strong indication that the practitioners felt that there is a significant potential for
successful integration of the 4+1 principles within Scrum. There were some
issues where practitioners were concerned to focus only on one safety standard,
and neither the agile practitioners nor the safety practitioners had a clear
understanding of the outlook and work of the other group. However, we used
these issues to inform a further set of questions. We conducted semi-structured
interviews with participants to explore the general feasibility of the approach, and
to provide an assessment as to whether the 4+1 principles can be addressed
without compromising agility.
Keywords. Safety-Critical Systems, Agile Methods, Assurance Case, Scrum
1 Introduction
Evidence and experience concerning the integration of Agile development in the field
of safety-critical software development is limited. However, there are some published
case studies and research on successes or failures in that field, [1,2]). Agile methods
are known for being fast, efficient and adaptive, as well as fostering discipline and good
adfa, p. 1, 2011.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011