DO-178 – SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS IN AIRBORNE

SYSTEMS AND EQUIPMENT CERTIFICATION

• Authoritative source for procedures to certify the

civil avionics software

Central theme
Disciplined approach to software
definition,development,testing and configuration
management to yield software that is traceable,
testable and maintainable.
 Levels of criticality

• Recognizes three levels of criticality in software

 level 1 – critical
 level 2 – essential
 level 3 - nonessential
• Modules must be developed at its highest level of
criticality when criticality changes with mission
phase or aircraft state
 Generation and delivery of software

• Divided into three phases

development
verification
assurance
Software development and verification
activities
 Software development and verification
activities
• System requirements – must be verified since any
error may cause potential catastrophic failure in
software
• Software requirements – developed and verified
with a correct set of system requirements
• Software design – understandable, traceable to the
design requirements, maintainable and testable
• Coding - verification of coding yields an error
free compilation
 Software development and verification
activities
Assurance requirements for three phases:
• level 1
1. Results of verification process should be retained
2. Traceability matrices should be developed
3. Task completion should be audited
• level 2
1. summary of verification & statement of compliance
2. Traceability matrices should be developed
3. Task completion should be audited
• level 3
No assurance measures
 Software development and verification
activities
Software testing

• Module level – focus on logic and computational

performance
• Integrated module level – focus on module
linkages such as data and control flow, timing
sequencing and partitioning
• Hw/Sw integration testing – verifies the
performance of software in target hardware
 Software development and verification
activities
Assurance requirement for software testing:
• level 1 & level 2
1. Requirement coverage analysis to identify test cases
2. Structural coverage analysis
3. All test plans, procedures and results of testing should be
retained
• level 3
No assurance measures
 Software development and verification
activities
Documentation
• Do-178 requires 14 documents for a complete
software package.
• Six most important:
1. system requirements: top level document.includes
description of LRU , certification requirements etc..
2. software requirements document: derived from the
system requirements. Includes functional and operational
requirements for software,criticality, performance under fault
conditions etc..
3. Software configuration management plan: Includes
configuration identification and control,configuration status
accounting, configuration reviews and audits, and supplier
control
 Software development and verification
activities
Documentation
4. Software quality assurance plan: procedures and
policies to ensure software quality standard. Includes
details on media control record keeping etc..
5. Configuration index document: major control
document. Provides index of all application
documentation. Exists at both system and LRU level.
6. Accomplishment summary: most important
document for certification authorities. Includes a list of
all other documents, description of system hardware and
software, criticality categories and software verification
plan and results