Developing Critical Aerospace Embedded Systems with Distributed Teams Using Agile Methodologies

This work proposes a set of complementary practices to agile methodologies, aiming at adapting them to the development of critical aerospace embedded systems by distributed teams. To identify the main gaps in this context, two approaches are used. The first one confronts the main activities required by aerospace standards for the development of critical embedded systems with a set of compiled agile practices derived from a review of the most common agile methodologies. The second one confronts the same set of compiled agile practices with the main problems of distributed development. The two approaches resulted in the identification of four gaps related to software integration, software traceability, communication management, and organizational differences. One complementary practice is then proposed for each gap. Two case studies were performed to assess the gaps and evaluate the proposed practices. Both emulate the development of critical embedded systems by distributed teams using agile methodologies. The case studies were performed with and without the use of the complementary practices. The results confirmed three of the four identified gaps and pointed to a clear contribution of the complementary practices.