DO-178B FAQs Page
Today the DO-178B standard has been adopted as a method of software component approval in A&D and other environments, including military, nuclear, medical and communications applications.
RTCA Standard DO-178B |
| RTCA Standard DO-178B is the de facto standard by which development processes can be measured to ensure an appropriate level of safety – Level A being the most stringent certification, Level E being the least stringent. The majority of software solutions for A&D with this requirement must include a certifiable code base along with the certification artifacts to support system-level certification. |
Five Levels of DO-178B Certification
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| Level | Safety Impact |
| Level A | Software whose failure would cause or contribute to a catastrophic failure of the aircraft. |
| Level B | Software whose failure would cause or contribute to a hazardous/severe failure condition. |
| Level C | Software whose failure would cause or contribute to a major failure condition. |
| Level D | Software whose failure would cause or contribute to a minor failure condition. |
| Level E | Software whose failure would have no effect on the aircraft or on pilot workload. |
Benefits of DO-178B for Aerospace & Defense include::
- Greater upfront requirements clarity
- Fewer coding iterations
- Fewer bugs found during unit testing
- Greater consistency within software
- Fewer defects found during integration
- Improved configuration management
- Easier regression testing
- More thorough testing
- Improved hardware integration
- Improved re-usability
- Fewer in-the-field defects
- Improved customer satisfaction
DO-178B Software Development Build vs. Buy (FAQs)
Q: What's the difference between a DO- 178B certifiable piece of software and software built without a certification requirement?
A: The DO-178B process is all about making reliable software, but the bulk of the effort is proving that your software conforms to the guideline. Depending on the level to which you are certifying, the actual software development effort can be about 20% of the project and creation of the certification artifacts the remaining 80%. This changes the development process significantly, making it much more resource intensive and time consuming.
Q: What is the price difference then between purchasing a COTS DO-178B certifiable software product and creating one's own?
A: A COTS DO-178B software product can save the customer as much as 70% of the cost of building the product from scratch. The COTS manufacturer can recover the costs over multiple sales, as opposed to the aerospace manufacturer who takes on the entire burden of spending millions of dollars to develop a certifiable product for a limited purpose.
Q: How does the customer save time and money when ALT works on a "built from the ground up" DO-178B development project unrelated to their graphics driver products (e.g., developing a networking driver for a single board computer)?
A: There are a few ways costs are reduced and time-to-market is accelerated by working with ALT. In terms of infrastructure, our in-house expertise and experience allows the customer to save time and money by having our experienced software development specialists and QA departments on the project. ALT also maintains the needed hardware and software tools for DO-178B certifiable development, so the customer does not need to carry those upfront costs for their project. In addition, ALT has a considerable amount of reusable IP, which can help the customer realize significant benefits and savings.
Q: How do you modify your products without having to re-certify them?
A: We do re-certify them, but the process is much simpler because of the way we build our drivers. They are architected to be modular, which allows us to make modifications per module. This way the bulk of the COTS software and compliance evidence can remain untouched during specific integration and customization efforts.