Managing ISO 26262 Compliance with Modern Requirements

In a heavily regulated industry such as automotive, increasing complexity is driving an enormous amount of efforts to provide safety-compliant systems.

ISO 26262 is an international standard that governs the functional safety of electrical and/or electronic (E/E) systems within road vehicles. The standard focuses on passenger vehicles with a maximum gross vehicle mass up to 3 500 kg.

The ISO 26262 standard provides regulations and recommendations throughout the product development process. There are eleven elements of ISO 26262, with a twelfth section specific to motorcycles:

• Part 1: Vocabulary
• Part 2: Management of functional safety
• Part 3: Concept phase
• Part 4: Product development at the system level
• Part 5: Product development at the hardware level
• Part 6: Product development at the software level
• Part 7: Production, operation, service and decommissioning
• Part 8: Supporting processes
• Part 9: Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL)-oriented and safety-oriented analyses
• Part 10: Guidelines on ISO 26262
• Part 11: Guidelines on application of ISO 26262 to semiconductors
• Part 12: Adaptation of ISO 26262 for motorcycles

Complying with ISO 26262 leads to substantial investments and can slow down automotive development cycle. Using the right requirements management tools can help accelerate the process and drive competitive advantages.

Modern Requirements is a world-class requirements management tool built on Azure DevOps. Modern Requirements is dedicated to helping carmakers solve requirements management challenges throughout the design, build, and test lifecycle.

The following list summarizes some of the key features of Modern Requirements that could be used to fill the gap of requirements management during the ISO 26262 compliance process. These benefits are crucial in helping you ensure that all of the regulatory requirements within your processes are met, resulting in quicker complete compliance, slashed product development cycle times and faster value delivery.

Modern Requirements is seamlessly integrated with Azure DevOps, TFS, and VSTS. It provides one single source of truth for development, requirements management, hazard and risk management, and verification & validation teams to work collaboratively and effectively.

• Smart Docs: An authoring module makes ISO 26262 compliance more efficient and less error prone. Bridge the gap between document and information management by authoring requirements in a document view online. Add detailed tables and leverage rich text, images and diagrams, while simultaneously creating and updating work items in the database. Multiple users are allowed to make changes to Smart Docs at the same time without having version problems or needing to check-in/out.
• Copilot4DevOps: ISO 26262 has many provisions which a car manufacturer must satisfy to ensure the safety of electric systems. Copilot4DevOps is an AI requirements management tool that helps you stay compliant with ISO 26262 in a few ways:
  • Elicitation: By using the elicitation function, you can generate a detailed list of requirements for electronic components from raw requirements data. This gives you a comprehensive set of requirements to choose the most relevant ones.
  • Analysis: The analysis function helps you analyze the quality of your requirements for the 6Cs of writing, which ensures requirements written by BAs and PMs accurately state stakeholder needs. This prevents expensive rework or misstatement of stakeholder needs.
  • FAQ: Finally, Copilot4DevOps enables you to elicit a comprehensive list of elicitation questions (and even suggested answers) with a few clicks. This helps ensure that a passenger car’s electric systems address all relevant ISO 26262 provisions.
• Version and Variant: Variant management helps you keep track of different hardware variants to help you ensure the functional safety of electrical and electronic systems within vehicles. It enables detailed traceability, stringent change control, and conflict resolution so all your variants fit their stakeholder needs while still staying compliant.
  It establishes stable baselines for requirements and efficiently manages variants, ensuring alignment with safety standards.
• Trace Analysis: Generate a traceability matrix in just seconds by using Modern Requirements to track end-to-end progress. Use the traceability matrix to mitigate risk by doing an FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis). A traceability matrix connects functional safety requirements with product specifications, and it tracks requirements against test cases (for V&V), bugs, risks, issues, and change.
• MatCal: A new feature in Modern Requirements to perform mathematical expressions. MatCal could be used to calculate the Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) automatically based on severity, exposure, and controllability captured in custom fields. It eliminates the manual efforts of doing the calculation outside the project environment. ASIL = Severity + Exposure + Controllability
• FAQ: Our pre-packaged ISO 26262 specific question lists help project teams gather robust and comprehensive requirements faster and easier. Users can also refer to over 3000 extra pre-built questions gathered from software and hardware developing processes to facilitate requirements authoring.
• Baseline: Baseline module allows users to take a snapshot of selected requirements at a point in time to allow control and tracking changes to maintain functional safety. Baseline could also be leveraged to reuse requirements across projects to avoid redundant work. It can also be used for branching and merging.
• Review: The Review module allows stakeholders to communicate, review, and approve within the project environment and facilitate change when necessary. This feature lets you connect e-signatures to selected reviews and achieve industry compliance. When nonconformities are identified, corrective tasks can be created directly that allows stakeholders to keep track of all requested changes. With one click of the mouse, users can generate an audit report to record every single review feedback of stakeholders.
• Diagram (Workflow): With Modern Requirements4DevOps, users can build workflows inside the same project environment that can be linked directly to requirements. Based on the workflow input, the system could automatically generate user stories, use cases, and test cases to elicit requirements during the safety analysis process. Diagrams can also be created directly within Smart Docs.

Smart Report: A feature built into Backlogs, Diagram, Smart Docs, Simulation and Use Cases, Trace Analysis, Baseline, and Review modules that makes reporting a breeze. It enables users to format their reports according to the work items structures. The report can be saved as MS-Word, PDF and in HTML format. These reports are configurable by the users.