Software Industrialization and Architecture Certification

The industrialization of software development induces several changes to the development process as software development becomes distributed over company borders. They cooperatively develop individual components that are later assembled to software systems. This division of responsibilities requires a stricter quality assurance and in fact, creates a setting where the certification of software products becomes increasingly interesting. Until now, there are a few software product certification approaches, as in non-component-based software development processes, the considerable effort of software certification was only rarely justified. Therefore, existing certification approaches do not consider and support the requirements posed by industrialization, namely the separation of component development (by various providers) and system development. This paper presents a software certification approach which takes these requirements into account and allows certifying individual components as well as system architectures.