The Who, Where, How, Why And When of Modular and Incremental Certification

The Defence Technology Strategy identifies modular and incremental certification as a key enabler to ‘Through-Life Capability Management’ as a means of reducing the impact and hence cost of re-certification of changes to systems. The Ministry of Defence has funded the Industrial Avionics Working Group, an industrial research consortium, to undertake a 'hot research' project investigating the production of a modular safety case (SC) for an aerospace software system currently under development. This paper provides feedback and lessons learned from this project.