Adopting DevOps Practices for Avionics Software Engineering
Wanja Zaeske · elib (German Aerospace Center) · 2024
Recently, Agile and DevOps have dominated the software development life-cycle in many domains. However, some industries are still cautious to adopt it. This holds true for airborne software engineering — often the traditional Waterfall Model determines the development activities. As no feedback loop is embedded into it, a lot of risk is involved: a poor design decision can easily remain masked for multiple years, before it finally is uncovered during testing or worse, in production. A way to control and mitigate this is Agile, and in particular DevOps. At its heart, DevOps emphasizes a strong interaction between Development and Operations, implementing a fast feedback loop which both increases the flexibility and helps to detect problems early. This thesis explores a selection of tools and techniques which either enable or improve the use of DevOps for airborne software engineering. To satisfy the unique challenges of the aviation industry, aspects of airworthiness are considered as well. DO- 178C, a standard used by aviation agencies around the globe to assess software regarding certification, serves as the source of objectives in this regard. Finally, the selection of tools and techniques are tested using a demonstrator, to gather first experience with the interaction in between them.