What impact does certification have on the safety of the resulting systems?
Is this one of those standards which involve a lot of questionnaires and box-ticking, but has negligible effect on the bug-free-ness of the resulting software?
(disclaimer: also a co-founder of Ferrous Systems)
The ISO 26262 is certainly an effective standard. The boxes to tick are of the kind "do you have your requirements written down?" ("will someone later know what this thing does?").
So, we do have to tick boxes, but we're free to pick on how to tick boxes :). What TÜV now certified is that our box-ticking process is fine.
I have absolutely no problem with framing this as box-ticking in some way, but that box-ticking has _meaning_. However, on an existing tool, that means you write the spec (spec.ferrocene.dev) and check if everything has a test implemented. Yep, that's an amount of pretty dumb and repetitive work. And pretty often, on widely-used software, for the happy path, you'll find that it's rather bug-free. So, yes, you tick the box, but you now know that this is in order.
In other cases and on less popular platforms, we frequently find issues like e.g. changes in code size between versions (which could hint to a bug). And it's not just super-niche targets, the last version had a size regression on certain arm targets.
As we're a downstream to Rust, we're actually incentivised to push changes upstream with preference, so yes, we contribute to the general quality of the Rust compiler (also of older versions) and with that to bug-free-ness of the resulting software.
So, we're over here, ticking boxes, informing parties when one box doesn't tick.
Is this one of those standards which involve a lot of questionnaires and box-ticking, but has negligible effect on the bug-free-ness of the resulting software?