Certificate Management: A Practitioner's Perspective

Abstract

Standards for critical avionics software development, such as DO178B, place a strong emphasis on process issues: ensuring traceability between different development artifacts and proper configuration management of these artifacts. Certification Management (CM) systems formalize many of the relationships between different artifacts and hold the promise of both streamlining the management of the artifacts and ensuring that relationships between the artifacts are formally justified. However, to be useful in an industrial context, the definition and scope of CM systems must be better understood, and several open issues must be addressed. This paper describes issues and potential uses of CM systems in industrial practice.