How to Achieve ISO 26262 Compliance
As cars become more complex, so do their hazards. Is your organization ready to mitigate these common pitfalls?
What is ISO 26262?
There’s a good chance the car you drive is equipped with an advanced automatic emergency braking system designed to prevent collisions. ISO 26262 ensures that emergency braking and similar systems are rigorously tested and verified, reducing the likelihood of failure. For every added benefit in modern vehicles—whether it be automatic braking, adaptive cruise control, or lane-keeping assistance—there is an added complexity in the car’s software, which means ensuring their reliability has never been more crucial. By adhering to this standard, car manufacturers can better guarantee the safety of their critical systems, protecting drivers and passengers—all while maintaining consumer trust and a positive reputation.
ISO 26262 is an internationally recognized risk-based safety standard that regulates the functional safety of automotive electrical and electronic systems. It provides robust guidelines to ensure these systems operate reliably and safely, covering all stages of a vehicle’s lifecycle. This standard helps identify potential hazards, assess risks, and implement appropriate safety measures to mitigate them—ultimately aiming to prevent accidents caused by system malfunctions. This protects drivers on the road, but it also provides the groundwork for auto manufacturers to preempt the kind of malfunctions that create legal exposure, widespread recalls, and reputational damage. Vehicle recalls due to software defects can cost an organization billions of dollars in damages and penalties. And given the rapid transformation of the auto industry to meet the demands of a market hungry for EV and increasingly autonomous vehicles, even a momentary reputational blemish can cede critical market share to competitors. Once that market share is lost, it can be extremely difficult (and costly) to regain.
To ensure comprehensive coverage of functional safety, the standard is divided into several parts, each focusing on specific aspects such as system development, hardware and software requirements, and even production, operation, and decommissioning. This modular approach allows automotive manufacturers to systematically address every aspect of safety throughout a vehicle's lifecycle.
Why is ISO 26262 compliance important?
Today, cars need increasingly advanced assistant systems to achieve high NCAP safety ratings. And without solid ratings, manufacturers might face reduced consumer confidence and demand, potential regulatory challenges, and an overall negative impact on reputation.
While it is easy to understand why ISO 26262 compliance is important, it’s also crucial for organizations to know why it is increasingly complex to maneuver. As automotive systems get more sophisticated, addressing the requirements of their evolving functional safety standards is becoming more challenging. The amount of code in each vehicle has increased tenfold in the last decade—and with the surge in code comes a surge in software requirements (and the complexity of these requirements has also increased, due to new assistant driving systems and digital features). And with the digitalization of cars, there are more interdependencies—meaning changes in one system can affect the performance and safety of others.
This type of challenge isn’t entirely new for the auto industry. Manufacturers are well-versed in the complex interdependency for hardware components (and using product lifecycle management to manage that complexity). But on the digital side of the house, the pace of transformation has been markedly swift. This rapid shift toward software-driven innovation requires a strong response from automakers to ensure their own digital innovation doesn’t imperil them. Like it or not, the auto industry is also now in the software business, and it requires the kinds of application lifecycle management (ALM) practices already adopted in high-tech markets.
Further, a tightening regulatory landscape means car manufacturers must be prepared for increasingly stringent regulations that their products—even the ones currently in development—will have to comply with. For example, as regulatory bodies and consumers alike are adapting to the idea of driverless cars, regulators are working to devise comprehensive standards to govern the functional safety requirements of modern automotive innovations. What this means for automakers is that not only do they need to get their digital house in order to meet exacting regulations—the regulations themselves are in a state of rapid change. Car manufacturers need solutions that not only meet today’s regulatory environment but are agile enough to comply with future waves of new regulation.
As these systems advance and new technologies emerge, the importance of adhering to standards like ISO 26262 will only increase. There is a growing need for safe systems development processes, and automotive companies are scrambling to provide evidence that they took all reasonable measures to satisfy system safety objectives during production. To help combat the surge in complexity, these companies are adopting more sophisticated methods of working, such as systems engineering, model-based systems engineering (MBSE), and agile frameworks. These state-of-the-art systems introduce new ways of fostering innovation and collaboration on an enterprise-wide scale.
Additionally, robust ALM solutions are being employed to manage the lifecycle of these complex systems, making sure that all safety standards are consistently met and efficiently documented. Compliance with ISO 26262 isn’t just a regulatory requirement; it’s a strategic imperative that impacts a company’s ability to compete in an increasingly crowded market. For car manufacturers, staying compliant means staying ahead—ultimately ensuring that their vehicles are not only at the cutting edge of innovation but also uncompromising in reliability and safety.
Common mistakes for ISO 26262 compliance
Navigating ISO 26262 compliance can be a complex endeavor, and even the smallest of missteps can lead to significant setbacks in automotive safety. Thankfully, organizations can stay on track by avoiding the common pitfalls that often derail compliance efforts. Using streamlined processes, driving awareness, training employees accordingly, and creating a shared knowledge system for ISO 26262 are all ways to ensure successful compliance.
Lacking a solid foundation
Without holistic engineering processes and enterprise-wide standardization, it can be difficult to achieve true ISO 26262 compliance—and even once it’s achieved, reaping all its benefits might not be possible. Employ state-of-the-art solutions to manage your complexity, establish end-to-end traceability, eliminate silos, and harness company-wide processes and methods. The benefits of developing a robust foundation reach far beyond ISO 26262—these processes also help gain efficiencies and reduce risks, accelerating overall time-to-market.
Skip skills development
ISO 26262 impacts more than just safety and engineering teams. It’s also closely linked to the entire product development process, including requirements management, test management, and configuration management. Attention and training on ISO 26262 compliance are essential to managers, process and tool owners, and developers. With far-reaching impacts like these, training is paramount.
Provide robust training procedures to empower your teams with a solid understanding of the various electrical or electronic system needs regarding ISO 26262. Organize these workshops with cross-functional teams of safety experts, process owners, tool owners, and developers so that all employees gain a holistic understanding of the process, are equipped to identify gaps, and share a roadmap to achieve common goals. Regularly update training concepts as standards evolve to keep your team informed and compliant. Integrate ISO 26262 training into onboarding processes to align new team members with safety expectations from day one. Incorporate ISO 26262 into ongoing training programs to foster a culture of continuous improvement and keep teams ahead of emerging safety challenges.
Overuse of tools
Development environments often evolve without a cohesive IT-tooling strategy, leading to a proliferation of tools with overlapping features and inconsistent approaches. This results in more interfaces, more redundant data, and more manual effort—yet still leaves you with less transparency and traceability. This wide array of tools can also result in integration challenges if systems fail to communicate effectively, leading to potential gaps in compliance. Respond by downsizing your toolbox to 10-20 individual tools to simplify ISO 26262 compliance and improve traceability. Effective executive decision-making and a holistic understanding of processes are key to streamlining tool usage, improving integration, and ensuring unwavering compliance.
Reluctance to use the right tool
Companies in the automotive industry often still use legacy tools and are reluctant to implement new ones, align processes, and change habits. Legacy solutions often lack the agility and holistic capabilities to help automotive manufacturers face the quickly growing complexity of the industry. Respond by selecting tools that can customize workflows and permissions. When evaluating technology, opt for solutions that deliver end-to-end traceability and the ability to add information into fields, with the option to template at scale. If multiple tools are required, ensure they provide individual interfaces and cohesive processes. Any technology investment must be uniformly integrated with existing practices to provide a single point-of-truth database. This enables traceability through all levels of the development process.
To meet current safety standards, organizations must be able to analyze, manage, and document functional safety throughout the development process – introducing nuances that were previously unheard of. Agile, scalable software platforms are crucial in ensuring consistency across operations, traceability of safety efforts and lifecycle data, and the use of reliable, proven safety processes throughout the software lifecycle.
Codebeamer uses an integrated architecture that allows for collaborative features, serving as a single source of truth in automotive development. Its Automotive ISO 26262 & ASPICE Template comes with domain knowledge, automotive best practices, and compliant workflows right out of the box—and it leverages these advanced capabilities to streamline the product development process for faster innovation and regulatory compliance. And with rigorous process control and approval management features, versatile quality assurance and testing functionality, and out-of-the-box capabilities to support risk management, the platform isn’t just powerful—it’s the go-to ALM solution for automotive manufacturers worldwide.