Industrial Challenges to Achieve Functional Safety Compliance in Product Lines

Developing safety critical products demands a clear safety argumentation for each product in spite of whether it has been derived from a product line or not. The functional safety standards do not explain how to develop safety critical products in product lines, and the product line concept is lacking specific approaches to develop safety critical products. Nonetheless, product lines are well-established concepts even in companies developing safety critical products. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory study interviewing 15 practitioners from 6 different companies. We identify typical challenges and approaches from industry and discuss their suitability. The challenges and approaches brought out by this study help us to identify and enhance applicable methods from the product line engineering domain that can meet the challenges in the safety critical domain as well.