Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2020

Under prevailing safety practices, software components should be “qualified” to be used in safety-critical automotive systems.

In automotive terminology, an organisation developing automotive systems has a quality management (QM) system. The parts of the system that are not subject to the more stringent safety-related (ASIL) requirements are developed according to the organisation’s normal (QM) practices and are called “QM” software.

Until now, safety standards have implicitly assumed that organisations that develop components have an "industrial-grade" QM system. The development and quality management processes employed in open source development diverge considerably from those envisaged by ISO 26262, the automotive domain standard. Qualification is far from guaranteed.

In other words, open source components must meet the minimum requirements of “industrial” software integrity in order to be integrated into safety-critical automotive systems.

This presentation examines the requirements that ISO 26262 imposes on QM software and presents approaches to qualify open source components as QM and integrate them in safety-critical automotive applications.