DevOps and safety – how do they fit together?

As of today, development processes in safety-critical industries often follow the V model described in prevalent functional safety standards, e.g., the ISO 26262:2018 in the automotive industry. Furthermore, most effort is spent to achieve an acceptable residual risk at start of production (SoP) and to address safety issues that arise during operation. But only little effort is put in continuously improving a product’s safety concept after SoP. With upcoming autonomous systems that function without a driver who is responsible for safe operation and operating in an open context that changes continuously, this strategy needs to be adapted.

For this reason and to be able to quickly adapt in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, even safety-critical industries tend to switch to DevOps, an agile process that considers both phases: development and operation. This leads to the question of how safety and DevOps fit together.