Requirements on functional safety and the ISO 26262 standard get more and more common in automotive projects. This puts requirements on the tools used in the development process to be compliant with ISO 26262. For a development process tool like SystemWeaver, there are two different aspects of ISO 26262 compliance. One is to achieve the process requirements of ISO 26262 (supporting processes), and the other is to have enough confidence in the tool (tool qualification).

SystemWeaver supports many of the supporting process requirements natively, while others depend on the meta model used, or must be achieved with other company processes. As a SystemWeaver meta model is easily extendable, most process models are possible to achieve. For a complete analysis of the supporting processes requirements (of ISO 26262-8) and how they can be achieved with SystemWeaver, see Introduction to ISO 26262 Solution, or contact SystemWeaver support for more information.

When it comes to tool confidence, the first step is to evaluate the necessary tool confidence for each tool used in the development process and then do a qualification of the tool if necessary. The evaluation must be performed by the organization using the tool, and although a pre-evaluation and/or pre-qualification of the tool can be done, it always has to be validated for a specific project (development of a specific Item according to ISO 26262). Based on the analysis made by Systemite, it is considered that the most common use cases of SystemWeaver (including Requirement management, Test management, Design, and different analyses) normally should be evaluated as Tool Confidence Level 1 (TCL1), although this depends on the related processes used. Thus, qualification of SystemWeaver is normally not necessary, although this must be confirmed by the customer's own tool evaluation as noted above.

The identified uses cases where a higher TCL level might be necessary are when there is a custom output tool (a SystemWeaver plugin or a tool using the SystemWeaver API) and where the output is used directly or indirectly in the product (for example a code generator). Consequently, this would require a tool qualification although it might not be necessary for the complete SystemWeaver tool chain. For a more detailed analysis on SystemWeaver tool confidence and qualification, contact SystemWeaver support.