Engineering Trust: Formulating Continuous Compliance for Open Source

Software has an increasingly important role to play in business, security and safety-critical applications. The complexity of the systems and hardware involved in these applications is also growing rapidly, and open source software is increasingly used in these contexts.

Established formal engineering approaches are not keeping up. They are often slow, difficult and costly to scale when applied to complex software and systems, and are not widely or consistently applied to open source software. They are often not intended, or not suitable, for managing rapid changes or continuous updates.

Requirements are a fundamental element in all of these established approaches, but requirements are broken. High-level requirements are a wish list; stakeholders just make a list of features. Low-level requirements are a narrative; developers just describe what is implemented.

Formal process models see the dynamic nature of FOSS projects as a problem, but this can be a key part of their value. However, because requirements are broken, the intent and expectations that inform the software are often lost in the noise.

So, how do we address these issues?

Codethink’s Paul Albertella and Kaspar Matas outline how the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework (TSF) — a lightweight continuous compliance framework, designed as and for FOSS — can help you to do just this.

Watch the talk to discover:

• An overview of TSF and examples of how it is applied
• How to organise and evidence your own objectives, including the intent and expectations that inform the software you are working on
• How the framework is used to manage automated, transparent and traceable bodies of evidence, which can be quantified by a confidence score
• How the results can be mapped to functional safety standards, to support certification and ongoing assessment.

Got your attention? Watch the talk in full below:

Interested in learning more about how to apply TSF to your project? Complete the form below and a member of the team will be in touch with you.