Functional Safety: the Additional Effort
Product development is already expensive in itself, now in addition you are to develop for functional safety. Many additional steps and documents stack up, see e.g. our list or the comprehensive blog post.
How can one estimate the effort for the development of such safety-critical systems? There is little information which is publicly available, so what seems reasonable to me, I have compiled here: references.
My goal was to develop a few simple factors for coarse estimates of embedded systems (software & electronics) that are easy to remember. The factors should express the effort as a multiple of the effort for a standard development project.
You can find the factors in this table:
Practical Factor | Quality & Safety Level (Examples) | Goals
|
---|---|---|
1 (Base) | "Normal" Product Development
| Function under normal conditions
|
3 | Structured Development
| Maintainability, Extendability, Quality additional:
|
5 | Critical Development
| Basic Functional Safety additional:
|
7 | Highly Critical Development
| Full Functional Safety additional:
|
As mentioned, these factors are only suitable for an estimation "by rule of thumb". For a more accurate estimation of your concrete project we offer our estimation tools or contact us for a workshop.
What is the most important conclusion to be drawn from these figures, apart from their use in coarse estimates? KISS! ...Keep It Simple. Every feature multiplies in effort! Which can only be reduced by omitting as many unnecessary features as possible...
Do you have other sources, numbers or experiences? Please write to me or comment below.