DO-254 requires stringent hardware requirements management for DO254 compliance. In the book “Avionics Certification: A Complete Guide to DO-254 Hardware” published in July 2007, the top attributes of DO-254 hardware requirements are detailed and include:
- High-level and low-level requirements compliant with D0-254 safety criteria
- DO-254 traceability, top-to-bottom, and bottom-to-top, e.g. Systems requirements, to hardware requirements, to design, to implementation, and to DO-254 testing
- Individual identification (tagging) of each requirement
- Extraction of requirements matrices and databases directly from requirements documentation
- Reverse engineering of DO-254 requirements from existing implementation, design, and high-level data if available
- Use of a DO-254 requirements review checklist to ensure the collective set of avionics hardware requirements meet the DO-254 requirements criteria
- Compliance to DO-254’s recommendations for requirements clarity, testability, and ability to deterministically implement
- Potential to generate DO-254 design and models directly from low-level requirements
- Potential to generate DO-254 test cases directly from requirements
Today, a variety of 3rd party vendor tools are available to handle one or more of the preceding attributes. More tools and vendors are entering the DO254 market regularly and the DO-254 Industry Group (this website) provides independent tool assessment and recommendations for all potential users