Managing Software Obsolescence

Yesterday, I attended the Component Obsolescence Group (COG) quarterly meeting, which was held at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford.  I was standing in for my colleague Alex Wilson, who wasn’t able to attend, and I gave his presentation ‘Managing Software Obsolescence through Standards.’

The presentation was about how open standards and software abstraction
can provide isolation from underlying hardware architectures, and can
assist processor architecture migration as part of a technology refresh
cycle. This is important in many A&D programmes, given in the
increasing in-service lifetimes of some systems, but the principle also
applies to other vertical markets too. The presentation also
highlighted how the RTCA/DO-297 standard provides guidance on the
development of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) platforms to enable
modular and incremental certification of safety-critical systems, but
this actually provides a side-benefit which can help address
obsolescence. This is because it advocates a role-based approach, and
advocates separation of the configuration data based on role and activities.

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