Mindful Application of Standards for Avionics - An Intentional, Systematic, and Measurable Transformation

Currently the aerospace community is faced with both challenges and opportunities in addressing safety in systems, software, and hardware. These challenges and opportunities include; : Increasing technology and environmental complexity making it difficult to assess for safety under current practices, : Regulatory guidance that is not adequately agile to keep up with the pace of innovations, : Shrinking budgets with pressure to do more with fewer resources, : Increasing global competition since aviation products are being designed, developed and fielded by more countries in the world, and : Opportunities to make use of advancing technology to increase safety by managing complexity. To create a more flexible, efficient, and safer system, certification authorities worldwide are transforming oversight based on transactions to oversight based on collaboration and shared risk. The aviation industry is also transforming to more self-guided responsibilities. The applicant and the regulators have begun a transition to a state which has progressively less direct involvement of the regulators in the compliance activities of the applicant. One of the foundational cultural, technical and business decisions to assuring avionics is the proper application of standards. This will result in safer equipment and afford the applicant a means to demonstrate maturity in safety-culture with measurable continuous improvement. Though currently applicants strive to increase maturity in compliance activities, these efforts are distinct within each applicant organization, appear to be ad hoc from an external perspective, and are not always measured. Such internal maturity indicators could be used for deriving the value-added level of regulatory oversight. Regulatory oversight in the transformed state needs to be intelligently customized to the level needed for the project to provide value and to preserve safety. The FAA currently uses some measures for estimating the proper level of project involvement using numerous factors, one of which is the applicant maturity in the accountability framework. Current assessment of maturity is not always supported by data. This paper proposes a method to sharpen value-added oversight, using software compliance as an example, to measure and demonstrate maturity via mindful application of standards (RTCA/DO-178B/C, RTCA/DO-278/A, RTCA/DO-254). This method is based on principles of the Capability Maturity Model, manufacturing quality, critical characteristics, key characteristics, and monitoring to find non-conforming parts, non-conforming tools, and non-conforming processes. These methods are superimposed on the idea of a software experience factory. This paper further gives examples of the types of question to ask with the focus on improving the tools, processes, and people. The applicant could use this method irrespective of the organizational standard practices to demonstrate the organizational safety culture and accountability. This method also makes a business case for increased product quality, increased work efficiency, increased job satisfaction, and better control over schedules because of de creased regulatory involvement.