ME-MPS: um modelo de extensão do MPS.BR para software críticos em ambientes regulados

Abstract

Critical software’s failure puts human life at risk or could cause significant financial losses. The success of this kind of software depends on the safety level assured by its development process. In regulated environments, using safety standards imposes specific requirements on critical software development organizations to guide them into a safety development process. On the other hand, the MPS.br Software Reference Model (MR-MPS-SW) aims to improve the software process quality of small or medium companies, being a highly applicable generalist model. The study proposes the ME-MPS, an Extension Model to MR-MPS-SW, that adds processes and Expected Results to guide entities interested in the study, adaptation, or application of the Brazilian model in critical software projects. Through the ME-MPS it is possible to derive a verification and adaptation process to the original MR-MPS-SW to comply with the requirements of a specific safety standard (target standard). In addition to the ME-MPS, this study presents, as a secondary contribution, an adaptation process defined to aim for the expected results established by Extension Model. In order to verify a research hypothesis that considered the existence of a distance-to-comply between MRMPS-SW and RTCA DO-178C standard (widely used for critical software development in aviation) and to prove the concept of the proposed model, an implementation simulation was executed. This simulation set a complete life cycle (processes, tasks, activities, artifacts, Etc.) to verify and adapt the MR-MPS-SW for compliance with a subset of aspects of the RTCA DO-178C standard.