Aerospace Software Development: Safety First

Aerospace software takes a long time to write, costs a lot of money and is normally late, for example the Boeing 787 was 2 years late and some of that time is due to software -
Why is that?

One of the main reasons, together with the complexity, is the fact that most aerospace software is 'safety critical'.

Safety critical software has a direct impact on the safety of the plane in that if there is a defect in the delivered software then this could the plane to crash.

A safety critcal example is the software that controls the engines. If that software has 1 defect that causes the associated hardware to reboot then there is probably only one outcome - the plane will crash.

How is it possible to have 'defect free' software when there may be up to 2 million lines of source code in the application?

Sit back, fasten your seat belt and we will explore the world of aerospace software development.